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You were asking for the Daily WTF url. So, here it is: http://thedailywtf.com/

Enjoy.

(Note: This is not to wind the parent up, but merely to demonstrate that it could be much much worse and slashdot is quite good in comparison)

In that model, the sole value of the stock is in the potential to convince another person to part with more money - if you're the last guy in the chain, all you have is a worthless piece of paper.

If you're the last guy in the chain, you have a portion of interest in the company, which is worth exactly what that portion of the company is worth.

The supposition that a stock is just a piece of paper is as preposterous as the oft-repeated notion that all money is just a piece of paper (or the more modern variant, numbers in a computer). Every company is a group of individuals who have invested their money and/or time into a collective endeavor to meet a common goal. Being publicly traded just means that during the offering, anyone can put their own money into the company and have a proportional amount of control over the collective endeavor. That's it. There is no magic or virtual wealth in the stock market. It's just a big market for trading goods.

It should be noted that all of these profit mechanisms can (and often are) applied to any traded goods. Stock is just very common. If you trade in commodities, you're actually buying and selling commodities. If you trade in stock, you're actually buying and selling your portion of a company.

And you are delusional. When the power of the engine is anywhere close to the toprated level of 400bhp, the gas demand is staggering. The point is that at no point, those engines are more efficient in terms of hp actually developed. You are paying, in dollars and gallons of gas, for a lot of headroom that is never used. As this is a car debate, I guss one should use a software development analogy, and I give you... this... Sure, a lot of headroom in your design for any possible need is a nice thing, but it is hard to say that it is efficient.

a lot of security installers are not IT techs
http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Just-One-Port.aspx

I'll only use them if you can assure me that they were chosen by fair dice roll..

[citation provided ]

Please let this happen... This whole centralized system has taken quite the while to be disintegrated and replaced with de-centralized censor-free one... then again, I guess no new system will be designed and used until the current one is no longer usable which, unfortunately, still is.

Hence why, real nerds, should stay on the lookout for the next DNS-destroying law, with least repercussions, and vividly support it... Only then, will we start thinking realistically of a new DNS system.

Bittorrent came in times when regular HTTP/FTP sharing became threatened, TOR came in times when anonymity was threatened, the whole FOSS world came in times when software freedom was threatened... Same for DNS, let's hope the change is soon.

And for a little laugh on the matter, http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Support-The-Daily-WTF-in-Supporting-the-Support-SOPA-Movement.aspx

http://thedailywtf.com/

Also:
http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/
And if you like rage comics:
http://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/

http://thedailywtf.com/

3) Add proper UTF-8 support

Agreed, but add it carefully. If you need to ask why, go look at The Daily WTF's tag cloud. Once you get over trying to figure out what the first two are, keep reading until you get to the upside-down and backwards ones.

Reminds me of the complicator's gloves.

The point is, that if the bandaid works for a period of more than about 24 hours, management will immediately decide that you need to work on something else, forget that you told them that this wasn't really the right thing to do, and your bandaid will be in place forever.

One of the sillier examples of this:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Fisher_Price_Technology_Integration.aspx

You should start reading TheDailyWTF. If your code ends up there, you are doing something very, VERY wrong.

And if it doesn't, even better -- you can learn from others' mistakes.

THIS. Use The Daily WTF for tons of fodder.

No, like the grandparent mentioned it says more than that.

If you have a project that takes one engineer ten months, then you can't finish the project in one month by assigning 10 engineers to the project, even if they all start working on the project the same day.

You can't even take that 10 month project and turn it into a 5 month project by assigning 2 engineers from the first day.

The networking and communication problems the grandparent mentioned are about how much more efficient it is for one human brain to keep track of the project than it is for more than one. The more people you throw at it, the worse it gets.

So the statement "10 engineers can be 10 times as productive working for a year as 1 engineer." is false. Presumably the team of 10 can get more work done in that year, but because of communication overhead it will be less than 10X the output of one engineer. If the group dynamics are terrible, it may even be less than the output of 1 engineer. (I'm reminded of http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Strong-Type.aspx where the source tree was deleted during a team fight.)

Of course, how the two situations will compare will vary. Some teams work better together. Some projects require a range of skills only available from a range of people. But the networking & communication problems decrease efficiency.

"I'm gonna write myself a new minivan this afternoon!"

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

Also:

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/The-Defect-Black-Market.aspx

No, you need True, False, and Null

Or True, False and FileNotFound. http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/What_Is_Truth_0x3f_.aspx

The story yesterday said that they were having a problem with certificate validation. The routine they were using to validate certificate expiration must not have been able to handle the leap year. I wonder what non-standard API they were using to process the expiration date. That reminds me of another article that I read yesterday.

When a data center is working on another company’s server then the one that they should be working on?

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Remotely-Incompetent.aspx

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

If it's literally as bad as you describe, your intended function is to fail as spectacularly as possible in order to be the fall guy.

I found this epic tale as an example of this situation. Knowing the indicators to look for based on others' hard-won experience can keep you from repeating their mistakes.

Mumps was NoSql before NoSql was cool: MUMPS and NoSql

Disclaimer: my only interaction with MUMPS has been via thedailywtf: A Case of the MUMPS

For me it still sounds pretty weird.. :)

But yeah, ram will help a lot, both for caching files, and especially if you use an opcode cache, like APC (which can also have a hot cache in ram).

The more ram, the less it has to wait for the horribly slow disk to spin around, and thus faster answer. Great Win (TM) :)

I'm still waiting for reasonably priced SSD's becoming normal in servers. *sigh* Being able to use an SSD for caching hot data automatically, without killing it instantly.. Sure, RAM is faster and cheap, but SSD is quite a bit larger compared to price, and still vastly superior to HDD. Ram first cache, ssd 2nd cache, disk for the stuff that no one use.

And regarding the game you mentioned.. My experience is that in the vast majority of cases, the speed problem isn't the language, but stupid code.. Write smarter, not harder! :D I don't know what he did wrong, but I know that he did something (or many things) very wrongly. 12 cores? For 400 users?

Reminds me of one of my sites, where you have long polling. First implentation (which I knew was bad, but it was easy and worked for small amounts of users) was just apache -> mod_python -> django -> polling events table every 1 second to see if latest id was changed. And abort routine after 60 seconds and reconnect.

As I said, it worked... For small amounts of users. When it started to hit the limit it hit it in a spectacular fashion. As requests got delayed, and errors started cropping up, connect queues piled up and clients reconnected and reconnected... It was like a small snowflake starting to roll downhill, and suddenly a house-sized snowball hit our server.

The current rewrite works fine for up to 1000 concurrent requests (tested on my dev server, which is weaker than prod), and worked (albeit with noticeable delays) up to 1500 connections. Current peak is around 500 connections. If we hit the new limit I'll need to rewrite it again. I have some ideas, but it would require more complexity overall, so for now the current one works great.

Err, anyway my point with that rambling was.. If you do something very stupid, then you need gigantic amounts of hardware, and can probably do things smarter. Of course..You have to look at the situation :)

Would you WANT to code in MUMPS?

This is brilliant

No no, that should read This is brillant!

Certainly on par with a lot of The Daily WTF postings, only now on a managerial level. Joy!

The problem with using only passwords to log in is that you then have to prevent users from having the same password. This can lead to serious security implications as discussed in this article.

This is the link he meant to post.

They'll have more tales of idiocy, and you won't feel like you need to take a shower afterwards. Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.

You're right, you should always use descriptive function names which describe exactly what the function does.

See, the world is always ready with a bigger idiot...

You're right, you should always use descriptive function names which describe exactly what the function does.

See, the world is always ready with a bigger idiot...

Oh and http://thedailywtf.com/ although it's not technically a BLACK out, but it's amusing as long as you get sarcasm.

I'm a coder (or what they would have called a "hacker" in ye olden days), and what is a OLTP, OLAP, RoR or ORM?

I'm assuming it's some enterprisey consultant shit.

After years of explaining this to people, I have come to the conclusion that no matter what people are going to do it. Simply put, if banks allow people to log in to their accounts from random computers, people are going to do so without any regard for security. It is convenient, and the one thing you can expect people to do is something that is convenient.

It's called Dancing Pigs. A user will most likely pick convenience over security.

And any bank that prevents logging in from public computers will be laughed out of business - people expect to be able to bank anywhere and everywhere. Even on their cellphones (they can't wait to go home and do it then...).

No way around it, unfortunately, and educating the user is a pointless exercise because they'll just go back to their old ways.

Perhaps if the bank issued them special keypad calculators that could compute transaction hashes (for two-factor authorization) things would help. But no.

And given banks already use Wish It Was Two-Factor, things won't be improving at all.

At least thedailywtf.com will have an inexhaustible supply of new material once all of these people get exciting jobs in the fast-paced software industry.

Who would want anything they make?

I don't know about the actual product, but I hear The Daily WTF wanted to look at the code.

Stealing source code from Symantec is like stealing your neighbor's garbage.

Hey, maybe if the source is published publicly, some bright person(s) can improve it and issue a "fork" of Symantec's code :)

All they probably have to do is remove a few speed up loops!

College for all does not work under the Traditional system in more ways then just cost.

General Education and filler classes are getting out of hand in some cases it takes 5 years to do what used to take 4 years.

Some classes like Tech ones are all over the place in terms of how much theory they have while other have more hands on.

Also the naming is a mess as you can look at 2 schools both with a track called CS and have each one be very different.

There is also a mix MIS, IT, System Integration, system design, and so on and it's to the point where Interviewers can mix it up. http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/More-Limitin,-Wrong-Major,-and-Parallel-Universe-Replacement.aspx

On other sides we have tech schools, on line schools, Community Colleges, people like Steve jobs who where drop in's and they all cover differnt needs and different students. But what give and what HR and others think of them is very far apart.

Now tech / IT could use some kind of mixed tech school / apprenticeships system. That takes the good parts of tech schools and or on line schools / learning Mixing it with real work skills.

Even after that we still can use tech schools, on line schools and Community Colleges for continuing education in the tech field this is need from time to time and Traditional college is not setup to handle it as good as other places can do it.

Also we have different students and some of them can't do a Traditional college but can do a tech school / apprenticeships system and do a good job. Now do you want people like that to have a good job or do you want them to sit on disability as they are not cut out for Traditional college and can't get a real job do HR not likeing tech schools? Ok now the disability part is kind of on the extreme end of things but there are lot's of other who fall in the middle.

You know the people who work on cars, plumbers and so on they did not have to go 4 years of mostly theory based school. Now tech / IT is kind of the same way and there is a BIG gap from a Theory based CS school and real IT skills at a tech school.

WYSIWYG = deeply utterly wrong!

Because the whole purpose of markup, is to give the data semantic meaning. Not to make it look a certain way. Ever.
If you write markup, and think about looks, you're doing it wrong!
This is why Dreamweaver, Office software, and all those content management systems imitating them are so wrong and counter-productive.
What you need is, WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean).

But you're right about "another syntax". Wiki syntax, just like TypoScript & co, is a great example of the "inner platform anti-pattern"
It's a more kludgy and crippled clone of HTML. It's easier and cleaner, to just write HTML, and be done with it. (In TypoScript's case it's even worse, as it's implemented in PHP, which is designed as a template language itself! ^^)

But I am, right now (well, after Slashdot... ;) developing a CMS that goes the right way. It is, interestingly, not web-interface based. All you need to input content, is a XML editor and a file manager. (Interally, it's using binary markup, and not shitty XML obviously, but that's transparent to users.) All you need to define structure, is a plain text editor and a knowledge of e.g. RelaxNG (C syntax obviously), SQL DDL, or a very simple custom format also based on markup (recommended, as the former two are mainly for easy conversion).

Fuck WYSIWYG and "the traditional approach of CMSes"! Fuck users thinking they know better, despite knowing shit about anything other than the horribly wrong approaches they got used to from other spineless developers trying to create a idiotic "analogy" to physical paper and crayons that doesn't fit!

I'm doing it right.

I disagree. This is a comparison of good programming techniques (structured and modular code as taught in the '70s) versus the newbie approach, sponsored by Microsoft, of just throwing stuff together and seeing if it works.

The bad code of today is a far higher percentage of the code than it was in the '70s and '80s. All you have to do is read The Daily WTF to see that. I looked at some "new" code the other day and it was riddled with GOTOs. I was taught GOTOless programming in the early '70s and still use it today.

Now this story shows that the hosting company's can get mix up and do you want to take that risk with your data??

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Remotely-Incompetent.aspx

On the other end of the scale you have this. Why solve a problem the really, really hard way?

I'm looking forward to reading the full story on The Daily WTF in a few months.

How about writing an MS Office killer ...IN MS Office ...for use on computers "portable" by donkeys? (Yeah, you read that right, and it really happened!)

Or printed, placed on a wooden desk, photographed, pasted into Microsoft Word, and then saved as HTML?

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Web_0_0x2e_1.aspx

AS the Companies say they want CS but the schools they want them from a the theory loaded schools that are lacking in the skills.

They don't want the tech schools even when they do teach the skills needed for the job.

Some places even say that some more tech based Majors are what we want.

http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/More-Limitin,-Wrong-Major,-and-Parallel-Universe-Replacement.aspx

There should be tech schools with apprenticeship for IT work.

Maybe that's how this happened: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Rutherford,-Price,-Atkinson,-Strickland,-and-Associates-Dentistry,-Inc.aspx

Alex at The Daily WTF wrote about this problem back in 2007: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Riddle-Me-An-Interview.aspx

Emacs is a nice OS. Only its text editor is a bit shitty. ;)

In other words: I think people's beef with Emacs is that it is a great example of the inner platform anti-pattern.

I mean, see here...

Sorry, obviously the link is incorrect. The correct link: The Daily WTF.

Software people are happy to use more resources to do the same work.

I suggest you look into demoscene. Given some particularly small limit (such as 64kB persistent storage), they make real-time rendered videos. Efficient use of resources means more detail in the final video, and that's a major goal.

I certainly can't deny that there are some programmers who will happily waste resources on bad algorithms. Such cases are well-documented and laughed at by those who aim to be better.