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My favourite is that whenever anyone tries to crack a password, they magically have a progress bar (presumably to heighten the anticipation as the bomb ticks down)

Librarians have being dealing with 'IT' for much longer than we are. But, yes, they're probably bad at programming computers.

And, about 'enterprise-class'... This site has a very nice definition of it.

could we please have an end to silly and blatantly false assertions like this one?

Note for anyone reading this, my previous post was not 'flamebait', it's true, the software sucks for the reasons I've outlined. I have nothing against Linden Labs or Second Life or any other online 'virtual worlds' vendors and it's fair to point out they almost all suck for largely the same reasons, but suck they do.

None of the 3D engines you talk about could handle the job. All of them precompute and cache things to speed up the display.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can easily have a scripting engine, set item box boundries and define levels of interactivity (and even do animations) all in real time using mostly pre-rendered objects (e.g. in the case of animations even making an 'object', such as a beach buggy, out of say 5 objects tied together (i.e. a chassis object and four wheel objects)).

Second Life cannot do that because absolutely everything in the world is dynamic.

Not so, which you'd realise if you'd put a little thought into it.

Now, perhaps, the engine could do with optimising more... but you cannot compare it with Quake/Unreal etc etc. It does MUCH more work per frame.

There is no perhaps about it, even for what it is doing in real time it should be a lot faster, they have do be doing something deserving of The Daily WTF for it to be running as badly as it does, truly. The developers of the major physics engines, such as Havoc, have real time demo code that puts the poor performance of SL's engine into prespective (demos which do a lot more with a large number of primitive objects and with really good collition detection on them).

I am quite aware of the (obvious) differences between the SL engine and say the Unreal, Quake or Battlfield series engines (with their pre-rendered worlds and objects). The whole idea behind having pre-built models is that it would solve a lot of the problems that SL developers have not been able to resolve.

None of that precludes it from still from having fully interactable pre-built models that can be downloaded on the fly (in fact, IIRC, the Quake series has had the option for players to have their own models that can be sent out to clients only the fly during a match since Quake 2 / 3, which must be like ~ 8 years ago now - and that was when most players at the time where 56k - a simple example, but proves the point somewhat).

A more relevant example might be Soldner - while it is infamous for a myriad of other reasons (it was abandoned commercially before being finished, has broken netcode and was quite unstable and JoWooD, the production company behind it, are widely disliked) the actual 3D performs well and looks reasonable, has fully deformable terrain that streches for miles, and is highly interactable (with scriptable pre-rendered objects - e.g. buildings with walls that can be demolished by tank shells, destructable doors and windows).

It's not a huge leap to think of how you'd then add the dynamic downloading of pre-built (scripted) objects.

Disclaimer: I have a lot of trouble getting interviews, so I've only tried this out once or twice.

When someone asks for a code sample, show some interesting bugs you've fixed.

My personal favorite is a place where someone strcpy'd into a buffer gotten from malloc(strlen(src)) (bug: 1 should be added for the terminating null), and the bug only showed up when the string's length was an exact multiple of 16, because the platform's malloc() implementation rounded allocation up to multiples of 16. Oy, that was a tough one to track down.

I've also seen and whacked a depressingly large number of instances of strcpy(foo, NULL) in my current day job (the clueless attempting to zero out a buffer). It doesn't necessarily have to be a full-on WTF like that, though.

Usually these kinds of things can be generalized enough that they don't really reveal anything proprietary.

You can always "lift" some snippets from here.

The matrix is a piece of software I discovered on thedailywtf.

Its nightmare inducing

Not sure how this post is related to the topic but for here's a link to explain this comment: http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/104727.aspx

And if you're lucky enough, you may get a tutoring session from Paula Bean!

I heard that she's brillant...

read LOTS of other people's code (DL a smallish OSS project at first, then larger ones).

Especially here: http://thedailywtf.com/

Learning what not to do can be as valuable as learning what you should do. The comments can be useful too, the problems get picked apart pretty extensively and can be quite educational. If anything you ever write never ends up on a site like that, you can't be that bad off.

I know a site with lots of great snippets to learn from!

Why do you need 'real AI' to get a drink? We may need what you call 'real' AI for some tasks, but if you're wanting to design sentient beings to prepare your toast* or deliver a drink then you have missed the point a little. Just because you can do something, does not mean you should. Example

* yes, I've read/seen Red Dwarf, and so should you ;)

Boy, you have it EASY! Try explaining why the punch clock puts down 0.75 instead of "45 min." on their card, THEN it gets interesting.

Even that's easy compared to where I work. Our system has an option between a "100 minute clock" or a "60 minute clock".

So "1.5" can mean 1h30m, or it can mean 1h50m.

Let's just say I have fodder for a few days worth of entries to The Daily WTF from the "creative" ways some of our programmers have handled that.

I'm not to worried about this because most users are aware of attachment exploits like this.

Yeah, people like this user know all about things like that.

I would suspect that making a device which intereferes with first responders (or any gov't) frequency would count as harmful interference and be illegal under most coutnries laws.

Who said they did?

"Interference" is not a reflexive relation. If you put a WAP next to six microwaves, you're going to have problems with your wi-fi network. But your WAP isn't going to overcook your food.

This story is about the USAF's use blocking garage door openers, not the other way around.

The questions is *when* did the US gov't acquire this frequency?

Another poster says 1934.

Sell Fish

... they are rather quick to quash and fix a discovered security bug. Yes, there's a reason why I used both words. Check out the aftermath of this example at The Daily WTF.

The Spider of Doom at The Daily WTF.

If you do it with uncommon sense, though, it can go horribly wrong...

I recommend some therapy at www.thedailywtf.com The truth is: a lot of insane programs are out there

Also, be sure to check out the Oracle Fanclub

they don't want to learn about algorithms, they want to learn C++

If you don't know about algorithms, you can't know C++.

The closest you might be able to come is to excel at WTF++. Sadly, some employers can't tell the difference.

Can you imagine the support nightmare Microsoft would unleash upon themselves if they did what the article suggests?

Articles like this underline a huge problem in the software industry. Too many people think that software is easy, and that all any problem needs is a few software tweaks. Too many people are willing to offer up solutions without thinking the issue all the way through.

It is attitudes like this that lead to failed billion-dollar IT projects, most of what is offered on the Daily WTF, and VB hacks promoting themselves as software engineers.

Also, because of the huge amount of data involved, unexpected things will happen. For example, our system tried to crawl an online game. This resulted in lots of garbage messages in the middle of their game! It turns out this was an easy problem to fix.

For a good chuckle, see The Spider of Doom on the Daily WTF.

And please use robots.txt.

And go see Google Webmaster tools.

And don't wear socks with sandals. Well, ok, this one is optional.

Rochester Institute of Technology has an entire Software Engineering department. Students who take the basic Software Engineering course learn about the software development cycle and work in a team to develop a basic program. I don't see how a Computer Science student could graduate without a little background that area. Maybe that's why there's always an abundance of code at The Daily WTF?

If your developers are too lazy to set up a test system that is imaged the same as a production box, with a test account at normal user privileges, why do you keep them around? This is part of the reason why I had to switch titles, to be honest, not just the perception that developers are criminals. Most of the restrictions I was forced to live under are due to other programmers deciding to make code changes and fixes on the live servers, during production hours, causing many hours of application downtime and possible data loss. It's developmestuction "programmers" like these that give the rest of us a bad name...

However, I believe that a good programmer, with an established methodology of development, with separate environments (dev, testing, production) and a change control approval system to move code and binaries from one step to the next, shouldn't be crippled in that process by a bureaucratic overreaction. As the situation was turning out, I would need to request that a desktop support technician, who had full access to the network, move my code from one step to the next. Granted, these guys aren't just minimum-wage helpdesk monkeys, but they aren't exactly SQL-savvy, and to ask a non-coder to make the necessary database changes and software installation was pretty much like having a mechanic ask a car salesman to put a new engine and transmission in his car.

... http://thedailywtf.com/ then decide. Look at the number of things that can happen when large corporations employ vast numbers of marginally competent programmers to work in an overly complex framework. I admin that I am biased, mostly because I am a Perl programmer; pretty much have been for over a decade. I spent six months doing Java and hated it. The company I worked for switched from Perl to Java and IT seemed to fall on its face in the process. I was working with mostly the same people that had been Perl devs, but the Java environment was awful. I nearly ran when I was given an offer to go back to Perl.

I'm sure that .Net and Java are not the same. I have never subjected myself to it. Ultimately, I think enjoying what you do is extremely important, unless you feel that you are getting so obscenely overpaid to do something that you hate that you can justify to yourself doing it.

Congratulations and good luck.

In the Perl company hackers make technical choices

That's likely but not assured; small shops often revolve around one big ego. http://www.thedailywtf.com/ supplies a steady stream of examples. I'd ask questions that might turn up something in the interviews.

What you also need to watch out for is the possibility that in the small company, hackers make business choices too

All you "experienced Java programmers" are in luck!

For some reason this story just makes me think of a recent daily wtf. Thankfully aside from our core service providers the CTO I work with tries to keep almost everything within our relatively competent in-house operations and most of the applicable problems in the article have therefore been avoided.

I caused quite an uproar with a post to The DailyWTF where I proposed that dates like “September 31, 2005” could be considered the same as “October 1, 2005”. The responses are varied and some of them insightful. Worth a read if this stuff interests you.

However, you have to make the choice between being a seller (which means lying to customers - no salesman ever tells the truth), and being a person who does something productive. The two things are not compatible; sales is a zero-sum activity.

Wow. With that kind of attitude, you'll never be a decent salesman! If you think that decent sales and representing the actual value of your product are mutually exclusive, you are dead wrong.

Sales can be a zero-sum (or even a negative sum) activity, just as coding can be. For examples of negative-value coding, see Developmestruction - a bit of searching here would do you good.

Sales is the process of overcoming communication friction. If you build a nifty widget that has some real value, its value is fully and completely unrealized until people know about it. It takes a sales and/or marketing department to overcome the intrinsic communication friction in order to let people know about your widget and what it's real value might be.

It's a process that's inherently neither good nor bad.

I've done work for a few companies who tried to hang on to their legacy software forever, usually vertical apps. None were successful with the strategy. Usually it's a lazy CEO/CFO who's afraid of change, or a profound misunderstanding the economics of IT. And, when these companies eventually break down and replace the app, they usually screw it up one way or the other.

But There is no need to change it!

On a more serious note, yes you're entirely correct. It might not be easy to change, and people will be confused but it is the right thing to do almost all of the time.

Whee! This post is worthy of its own entry in The Daily WTF. I'm sure glad I don't with you.

"If a PHB perceives that your job can be done by sombody else so you are either replaced by this somebody or you let yourself being blackmailed into working longer for less etc."

FYP. Neat story:
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/post/96909.aspx

A guy with some insight can write a bit of code that saves five digits' worth of hardware investment, but it means dick if there's a manager around who measures success by how much of the company's money heshe spends.

I work for a medium sized non-technological global company in an Analyst Programmer/Systems Analyst position. At present we're re-doing the websites which should be completely re-written. Unfortunately we are sticking with this "polish the turd hard enough and you've got gold" philosophy.

The problem is because IT development is seen as needless expense (besides the fact that it holds the company together). We are the "plumbers" of the company, just fixing the "internets tubes" and computers which "dump stuff on to them, like a truck".

Because of this devalued position within the company, a lot of usual IT jobs (such as website design) is handled by Marketing, who have no idea about website development and give us these seemingly impossible pages to create, which aren't intuitive, and come up with "brillant" (see http://thedailywtf.com/forums/40043/ShowPost.aspxP aula's Birllant Bean) idea's like an entirely Flash Website with movies and graphics (Our primary task is a online store).

Then I read about Google, getting their programmers to spend 20% of their time creating something they want, and looking for innovative people. Perhaps this is only in companies which are technology based companies, or at least understand what technology can do and how best to use it.

All righty then... time to clam down...

I for one welcome our new Marketing overlord's.

Brillant?

Brillant?

Took me all of 3 seconds Googleing for "brillant site:thedailywtf.com".

Paula's Brillant Bean:

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/40043/ShowPost.aspx

Er, sorry, the period at the end of the sentence was obviously not supposed to be part of the URL. Corrected version:
http://thedailywtf.com/

A reference to "The brillant Paula Bean". See http://thedailywtf.com./

Sorry, I'm too lazy to search for the actual article in which she was featured right now.

I wouldn't take it too personally. Anyone who's ever been in the consulting business can tell you that the government is the bread and butter of many-a-company. Anything - and I do mean *anything* - that threatens that revenue stream is considered bad. The companies that have managed to survive through government contracts become quite good at playing the political game. So you can be sure that they're the force behind the lobbying group.

The scary part is that a lot of these companies simply can't survive on the open market, so they turn to the government looking for a "me-too" handout. Unfortunately, they often get it. All they need to do is promise high and deliver low. For a humorous example of this, check out the Virtudyne sage over on The Daily WTF:

Virtudyne: The Founding
Virtudyne: The Gathering
Virtudyne: The Savior Cometh
Virtudyne: The Digital Donkey

BTW, I love this line: "The limited window with which we and others have had to comment clearly has hampered a more comprehensive reply."

Translation: "You didn't give us enough time to buy off the politicians."

I wouldn't take it too personally. Anyone who's ever been in the consulting business can tell you that the government is the bread and butter of many-a-company. Anything - and I do mean *anything* - that threatens that revenue stream is considered bad. The companies that have managed to survive through government contracts become quite good at playing the political game. So you can be sure that they're the force behind the lobbying group.

The scary part is that a lot of these companies simply can't survive on the open market, so they turn to the government looking for a "me-too" handout. Unfortunately, they often get it. All they need to do is promise high and deliver low. For a humorous example of this, check out the Virtudyne sage over on The Daily WTF:

Virtudyne: The Founding
Virtudyne: The Gathering
Virtudyne: The Savior Cometh
Virtudyne: The Digital Donkey

BTW, I love this line: "The limited window with which we and others have had to comment clearly has hampered a more comprehensive reply."

Translation: "You didn't give us enough time to buy off the politicians."

I wouldn't take it too personally. Anyone who's ever been in the consulting business can tell you that the government is the bread and butter of many-a-company. Anything - and I do mean *anything* - that threatens that revenue stream is considered bad. The companies that have managed to survive through government contracts become quite good at playing the political game. So you can be sure that they're the force behind the lobbying group.

The scary part is that a lot of these companies simply can't survive on the open market, so they turn to the government looking for a "me-too" handout. Unfortunately, they often get it. All they need to do is promise high and deliver low. For a humorous example of this, check out the Virtudyne sage over on The Daily WTF:

Virtudyne: The Founding
Virtudyne: The Gathering
Virtudyne: The Savior Cometh
Virtudyne: The Digital Donkey

BTW, I love this line: "The limited window with which we and others have had to comment clearly has hampered a more comprehensive reply."

Translation: "You didn't give us enough time to buy off the politicians."

I wouldn't take it too personally. Anyone who's ever been in the consulting business can tell you that the government is the bread and butter of many-a-company. Anything - and I do mean *anything* - that threatens that revenue stream is considered bad. The companies that have managed to survive through government contracts become quite good at playing the political game. So you can be sure that they're the force behind the lobbying group.

The scary part is that a lot of these companies simply can't survive on the open market, so they turn to the government looking for a "me-too" handout. Unfortunately, they often get it. All they need to do is promise high and deliver low. For a humorous example of this, check out the Virtudyne sage over on The Daily WTF:

Virtudyne: The Founding
Virtudyne: The Gathering
Virtudyne: The Savior Cometh
Virtudyne: The Digital Donkey

BTW, I love this line: "The limited window with which we and others have had to comment clearly has hampered a more comprehensive reply."

Translation: "You didn't give us enough time to buy off the politicians."

Wrong forum, dude. Besides, Paula's more enterprisey than ajaxy.

You mean like THIS:?*

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95273.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95506.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95733.aspx

* damn. how do i combine ":" and "?"???

You mean like THIS:?*

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95273.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95506.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95733.aspx

* damn. how do i combine ":" and "?"???

You mean like THIS:?*

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95273.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95506.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/95733.aspx

* damn. how do i combine ":" and "?"???

I've heard of Community Server, as it also powers The Daily WTF.

Unfortunately, the readers of the site are generally of the opinion that "The real WTF is this forum software" because "the forum software sucks" ...

For what it's worth, it appears to be great as a blogging tool; Alex seems to like the way it works for the blogging functions, but the forum functions are what are generally found to be "quirky"...