Slashdot Mirror
Domain: thedailywtf.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to thedailywtf.com.
Comments · 952
-
Re:Really, proven free of bugs?
Ah yes, "proven" https://thedailywtf.com/articl...
-
Re:Dead Programming Language?
-
Re:True browser sandboxing yet with this feature?
Years of watching Jurassic Park and I still love Silicon Graphics (it's a Crimson they have there - I have a Tezro and 3 other SGIs), the Mac Quadra 700 (I have two of them), and Thinking Machines supercomputers (hehe, I don't own one of these!). I love that freakin' movie.
-
Re:Fake HD alert
More interesting if one has to fan the computer while it's encoding.
-
Re:Medical records and STUPID systems architects
Dang, The DailyWTF.
-
Epic??? still useing mumps? that is bad
-
Epic??? still useing mumps? that is bad
-
Epic??? still useing mumps? that is bad
-
Epic??? still useing mumps? that is bad
-
Epic??? still useing mumps? that is bad
-
Job security? They should add in a speed-up loop!
An oldie, but a goodie.
-
Re:It's going to be a bad thing
Take your pick. Most of those can only be described with: WTF which is not very welcoming or inclusive.
I'm sure you could flower it up and give people a short manual on how to code correctly every single fucking time they have to correct something.
Sometimes short and to the point is better, faster, easier and more productive than "oh, this code is somewhat unreadable and you're doing it in a way I would not recommend people do code, not to say you do it all the time, but
-
Re:meanwhile...
The complexity of the physics and chemistry, the enormous manufacturing engineering effort and the management coordination required to direct the billions of dollars in capital necessary to achieve that is mind-boggling. Six point nine billion transistors onto a one-square-centimeter chip.
How many of those are actually useful as opposed to merely making up for deficiencies elsewhere in the design?
The 386SL comes to mind, with its SMM-introduced insecurity and requiring three times as many transistors as the 386DX. I'm sure there are many, many more examples. Put another way, with a better design you might be able to do more and do it faster than with a more complex design that happens to be a poorer match to the task at hand. See the story of the J1 FORTH CPU.
Yes, the numbers are impressive, but just like USB speed claims (how come a 480 Mbps USB link is easily outperformed by a 400 Mbps FireWire link?) they don't tell the whole story. Just like how "7 nm process" says very little these days.
It's at times like this when it seems we are finally living in the future. Electric cars, re-usable space rockets, 3D printed titanium.
You could've made that case in 19th century, even though that was right on the heels of the end of the golden age of sail and its riches. I don't particularly want to go back, but a little perspective goes a long way. Or, looked at it from the other side, we've been promised flying cars for a few decades now. Still not mainstream. So we have some future coming yet, right?
Meanwhile, FEMA finally found the 20,000 pallets of potable water bottles it shipped to Puerto Rico. On the airfield where it left them. After the expiration date.
Accidents happen. They shouldn't, but they do. In a large organisation like that, a small clerical error can indeed have that sort of result.
Ever heard the story of the futures trader who ended up having a barge full of coal delivered to the trading office? That sort of shit happens in commercial enterprises just the same, but it's not paid for out of the public purse. Unless you're "too big to fail" of course.
Without devolving into absolutist Ayn Rand libertarian zealots, maybe we can all agree that there is something to this invisible hand, free market, capitalism stuff.
"Let's just nod in agreement..." hell no.
You, like so many others, are confusing "good management" with the profit motive. They're not remotely the same, and that is one reason why many privatisation projects fail utterly.
-
Just say no, to the inner-platform effect.
Ads are just an artifact of a system that is already rotten to the core.
Current "web browsers" are the epitome and prime example of the "inner-platform effect". A software design anti-pattern that is basically the application of the Xzibit meme to a platform. In this case, your operating system.
All I'm waiting for, is somebody implementing a good browser as a "Progessive Web App".The fallacious reason they are doing it here, is that they confuse virtualization with a security solution. And that they honestly believe, that the web platform is somehow easier or better for developing applications in.
I've done both. I wrote my first web app in 1998. I used AJAX-like functionality, years before AJAX even existed. (E.g. via an <object> tag containing a form to submit data and return basically JSON with a callback.)
And no. Even today, it is far more convoluted, and not a bit easier. Especially nowadays, with its metric fuckton of APIs and "frameworks" (another software design anti-pattern, differentiating itself from a library by the lock-in and exclusivity).They should just transform their "web platform" into a set of libraries, like e.g. KDE, but less frameworky. And have people implement applications normally. If they can handle not being treated specially and having to compete with much better designed libraries.
And the URL bar would be substituted for a package manager and an application launcher.While the traditional browser, would merely become a hypertext document viewer (and viewer widget component).
And the URL mechanism should be part of the OS's file system system anyway.Small tools that each do one thing and do it right, you know? Separation of logic, design, structure and content. Of view, model and controller too. Etc.
-
A clbuttic mistake.
Some day, somebody will buttbuttinate them.
-
Re: Don't no-show
Reminds me of the "IBM Survivor" anecdote on The Daily WTF:
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/IBM-Survivor,-The-High-Road,--Find-the-Function!
If you're taking abuse during the interview process, what will the job itself be like? Just leave!
-
Re:Do this and I can't do my job...
Or just let stuff fail do the Process
-
Re:Umm yea.
And I suppose you have no idea how a mouse is working.
You suppose incorrectly.
There is no 'special support' needed for an 'old mouse' or 'old track ball'.
That's the problem. A serial mouse has been a very very rare device for decades and yet Windows 10 will still search for them on bootup. If it finds something chattering away on the port, such as a GPS unit, the OS assumes it's a mouse or trackball, will install the driver for such a device, and therefore messing with the proper function of this not-a-mouse device. I verified that Windows 10 still supports serial mice and people have been complaining about Windows assuming something is a mouse (or mouse-like) device and have been looking for ways to disable this for years.
https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...
People have been complaining about Windows still supporting serial mice since Windows XP and Windows 2000, more than 15 years now.
http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...
If you ever had used a decent operation system, like any Unix, Linux, MacOs and cared to make a "> cat
I did know that. I have never needed to use a serial mouse because they've been obsolete since the PS/2 port came out in 1987 and was widely adopted less than 10 years later. Maybe serial mice were relatively common in the days of Windows 98 but they are all but extinct now. I bought a serial mouse just for grins and giggles 20 years ago because I happened across a serial mouse driver for MacOS and thought it would be fun to play with and have a three button mouse. (A multi-button mouse for Mac was a rare and expensive thing back then, but a serial mouse with three buttons could be had for less than $10. I suspect you knew that already.) Any "decent" OS will support USB mice and therefore not have a need to support something so rare today as a serial mouse. I suppose a "decent" OS might be expected to support a serial pointing device for someone that wants one, but this should be handled better than how Windows does. The serial mouse support in Windows appears to have become more troublesome than useful 15 years ago, and yet it remains.
Yes, if you find a serial to PS/2 adapter your mouse will still work
Yes it will, I don't know why anyone would want to though. Any "decent" OS will support a USB mouse and there are all kinds of USB mice, trackballs, and other pointing devices that a serial device should be a special case, and the person should be expected to have to install a driver for it themselves. If someone is buying a serial to USB adapter today to plug in a serial mouse then they are an idiot. They would be a double idiot for using a PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter, to plug in the mouse. A triple idiot would have a USB to PS/2 adapter, PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter. I suppose that might be fun to experiment with, or somehow necessary for someone using a real odd operating system, but no one should even want to use a serial mouse any more. It would be cheaper and easier to just buy a new mouse instead of trying to force into service a mouse that must be 30 years old now.
A "decent" OS would be able to tell the difference between a serial GPS receiver and serial mouse on the port. Since Windows 10 can't do that then therefore Windows 10 is not a "decent" OS.
-
Re:I want to believe, but
Yes, there is a single bit that stores the boolean value about if the current state is "locked" or "not locked."
Not necessarily, it could be file not found!
-
WebAssembly. Problem solved.
Seriously
Because let's be frank: Today's web browsers just shitty operating systems in virtualized platforms. The whole URL retrieval architecture is about the only plus they have over normal OSes. And I said for a decade, that we should just add application firewalls around our OS's virtualization containers, have an instance with a bare-bones OS pre-loaded in memory, and provide an URL input / state manager, that clones the prepared instance (just a memcpy), loads the file from the URL, and runs it inside the clone. For legacy support, there would be a HTML OS, based on a browser. Done right, it would entirely replace browsers, but without requiring a pointless layer of inner-platform effect.
At least web applications that is. Actual web pages
-
It's been done
-
Re: Binary
This isn't a 'joke' per se, but your comment reminded me of the chuckle I got from it way back:
-
When all you have is a hammer
I, for one, eagerly await reading about the new and exciting kind of WTFs that would result from this in The Daily WTF if this comes to pass.
-
Just use the OS password manager!
Why do browser makers always reinvent the wheel for every single OS feature... and do it badly too?!
(I’m assuming even Windows and macOS have password managers for ages now. I haven't checked tough.)
Somebody should tell them about the inner-platform effect.
-
Unfortunately, there's some truth to this
The level of incompetence in corporate IT at times is staggering!!! https://thedailywtf.com/articl...
Until there are -real consequences- to management (personally and individually) from getting hacked, CxOs of all stripes (CEO, CIO, CISO, etc) will continue to get away with this.
-
Re:Samsung TV's are junk, don't buy them
Were they using Tizen for their smart TVs?
-
Looking forward to the daily wft entries
I am looking forward to the daily wft entries, such as this one where they do find the max element of an array using two heap-allocated arrays and a bubble sort
-
Suuuuuuuure
This is all well and good for jobs that only require basic technical skills, but all that does is increase the pool of available people for jobs that only require basic technical skills.
And really, this has *always* been true for pretty much *any* company who isn't divorced from reality and think they need a PhD graduate with 20 years of experience for a junor java position.
However, this will be a massive problem if people blindly try to apply the same technique to higher skilled jobs that require not just the ability to push buttons and mechanically crank out whatever they're told to crank out. I've lost count of the number of people I've run into who have massive Dunning-Kruger syndrome, and think that they grok more than they actually do. These are the kind of people whose projects end up on sites like http://thedailywtf.com/ .
It's one thing to have "the skillz". It's another thing entirely to understand which of those skills is appropriate to use in a given circumstance. It's the equivalent of a carpenter that knows how to use a hammer, a screw driver, and a saw, but uses a hammer to bash a piece of wood in half instead of using the saw.
-
Depends
This depends on what we define as "developers".
Are we talking about people who have had formal comp sci education? Or people who read an html tutorial once and thought, "Oh yeah this is easy! I am a developer now!"
The number of people I've run into who think they are gods gift to software development, but don't actually know WTF they're doing, is staggering. Worse is when these guys have just enough charisma and knowledge to bullshit their way through interviews with people who don't actually know better, and your project ends up on http://thedailywtf.com/ cause it's so bad.
Just because someone knows how to copy code out of a tutorial or a stackoverflow post, doesn't mean they are actually qualified for the job.
-
Re:Written by someone who's not a programmer
Is that you, Paula?
-
Re:Tizen is summed up nicely by this TheDailyWTF p
https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...
Yeah, the first thing I though when reading the story was:
"SPANK SPANK SPANK! Naughty programmer!"
(a Tizen error code)
-
Tizen is summed up nicely by this TheDailyWTF post
-
Similar experience
Similar experience, I thought maybe I'd look up at Tizen apps "for fun" and after about a day or so I was certain it was not going to be any sort of fun! Well, unless S&M is your thing... And here is an educational article about the EFL libraries you get to use when designing native Tizen apps.
-
Re:Designers miss WYSIWYG (UI rant)
> Do you really want the server to have to recalculate every time I change browser window size?
-
Or from the classic TDWTF
Or, from the classic TDWTF: MUMPS.
No, Visual Basic has nothing on such "brilliant" languages, in fact it is much more pleasant than many other languages as well - e.g. COBOL.
-
That's my speedup loop, you clod!
For an explanation: http://thedailywtf.com/article...
-
Re:Production server
Have you submitted this to TDWTF yet?
-
Re:SMS?
If it's so terrible it certainly hasn't assuaged Google, Github, and a huge number of other big services from using it. Many of they are still ADDING support for it. If you're afraid of the government pretty much nothing is going to stop them. If you're just looking for general "good security," SMS will work fine.
The problem with SMS is well, you're assuming a person has a phone which has a phone number.
NIST wrote guidelines against it because a "phone has a phone number" is no longer accurate. A phone number may not refer to *A* phone, but maybe multiple phones. Or hijacked along the way (including the phone itself).
Google's switched to the Google Authenticator app, so while they can use SMS, it's a legacy thing.
Anyhow, this isn't true two factor authentication. You're really just using another password to log in - either use your site login, or log into facebook to change it if you forget it. There is no second factor in play (what you know, what you are, what you have). You either know the site password, or your facebook password.
This is more along the lines of Wish it Was Two Factor.
-
Not a simple "photovoltaic coat of paint".
If you can spend the same or even a bit less over a few decades by installing a pre-fab road surface with solar PV, you will do it even if that PV is less efficient than it would be on a roof.
The thing is, adding photovoltaic capability to a road isn't trivial. At all.
It's not just using the king of "coat of Photo Voltaic paint" that is mentioned in some Sci-Fi books that would be just mixed with the road's tar
(that would be rather trivially simple, if it existed).It's need to go at great length and expenses to achieve the engineering feat of taking something which is expensive and fragile and never designed to sustain repeated mechanical stress (a solar panel) and try to engineer around the limitation to cram it into a road tile.
To be more precise
There are advantages to pre-fabricated surfaces mass produced in a factory and quickly laid on site. The fact that they can put solar PV in the surface is just a bonus to reduce total cost of ownership.
The problem is this thing you call "a bonus" (adding a PV panel into the pre-fab surface) is not a small feat at all.
In the current state of affairs (technology available in this decade), it will require a tremendous amount of engineering, cost a tons of money, will require an enormous amount of compromises in order to pull of...
The sheer amount of investment to achieve this completely dwarfs any potential reduction of cost of ownership.All the while putting the solar panel beside the road is a viable and much cheaper solution.
This is exactly the same kind of overcomplicated and expensive over-engineering, like trying to cram an electric handle bar warmer in a bike, when you could just use fucking gloves
(But who knows, as regular PV panel become more popular, and strat to be put to lots of use, maybe by next decade, they will get much cheaper and slowly become more durable. To the point wher in 2026 it might be not stupid to try to find a way to engineer them into pre-fab pavement).
-
Re:Obligatory
FileNotFound LOL!
-
Tizen? Don't make me laugh
I worked on a contract in which an auto manufacturer was trying to use that abomination, and we could never even get the source to compile. Literally a year later, it came out that Samsung was trying to use both git/gerrit and Perforce as version control for it, mixed between different teams:
Time went by and Bad Things started to appear. Git/gerrit was official in some teams, but Perforce was official in other teams (even working on the same component). Some patches went there, some there. The management finally decided Perforce code should be used as THE source for building OS images. Again, they only forgot to tell everyone else to stop using git
Both repositories diverged to the point of being almost incompatible. Issues in Perforce code were given to git teams, which resulted in a litany of WTFs. After all, there’s not many things more fun than being tasked with fixing a bug in code that you physically don’t have. ASAP. Meetings took place, arrangements were made to rectify the situation. Months later, the situation is still the same.
One implication was code review process. With gerrit in place, that was a non-issue. But the Korean teams didn’t (and still don’t) understand the notion of code review and pushed everything directly to the repo. The quality of some patches was so bad that enforcing code review became top priority for non-Korean teams. Finally, a solution was developed – MS Word based code review. Each changeset needs to be attached to a bug in the tracker. Each bug can have a Word document attached with a request for code review. That document is a three pages long form with information so useless, nobody even wants to read it. At the end there’s a place for copy-pasting a diff for each file changed, with the explanation why. Reviewers are supposed to fill a Word form with details about which line they comment on and what their issue with it is.
Submitting a patch, clicking through the awful issue tracker and filling the form takes literal hours. All this because using git with gerrit was too tough. Fortunately, the review form has fields listing times taken by various steps in fixing a bug. Maybe someday someone will read how long pushing the code actually takes.
No, they won’t.
Luckily, that contract was short term. But because I put it on my resume, I got a few head-hunters inquiring about it. Quickly though, interest waned. Not hard to see why...
-
Re:Sooo, has anyone ... you know ... tried it ?
Have some Enlightenment. Enjoy!
Stolen from the comment above. Absolutely fantastic read. -
Re:Please let Tizen succeed
Tizen offers precisely nothing that Android doesn't already have, apart from lock-in to Samsung's eco system, with it's also-ran alternatives to things Google/Android already does far better (S-Voice is garbage, for instance).
Tizen is also a nightmare to program for.
Tizen is just an OS, but the underlying foundation is E! (Enlightenment, if you're not up to date on your old fancy X window managers), or more correctly, the E Foundation Libraries (similar to ones like QT and GNOME).
And if you've never done E!, well, someone more eloquent has stated the numerous issues with it.
-
Re: Denormalize
At least eight meters of documentation..
-
TRWTF
Yeah, I know, that's a different site but really:
TRWTF is allowing any kind of "pay for a service over the phone" operation where billing is done onto the telco bill. For example, calling a lawyer (those guys charge by the minute for phone calls related to a live case) leads to a bill from the lawyer's office, not the telco. That would be allowed, but not "you can talk to this sexy [choice of self-identified gender] for $5/minute added to your phone bill."
-
Re:systemd rocks!
-
The watch wants to turn off
Lee also had to deal with the fact that the Apple Watch's screen really wants to turn off when it isn't in use. To deal with that, he set up a motorized tube that constantly turns the Watch's crown, preventing it from falling asleep.
It's worth watching. Props to this guy for some cool software hacking skills. But his motorized tube reminds me of ITAPPMONROBOT.
-
TRASH11
This reminds me of an old daily wtf.
-
Re:And then there's filters...
-
Re:Been a lurker for years....
Infiniscroll is and has always been a bad idea. Try The Daily WTF forums for an example of infiniscroll taken to a completely stupid extreme. (along with a bunch of other stupidity courtesy of Jeff Atwood and Discourse)