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A "Devops Engineer" is an engineer working on the operations for a development environment. In other words, he's the guy who says "hey, our team needs better communications with the QA team, so let's set up a proper ticketing system, rather than just emailing problem reports".

Chuckle all you like, but ideally every dev team would have such a person. We've all heard the horror stories of developers using Word for source code, not keeping backups, and relying on a wall of Post-It notes for bug tracking.

On the other hand, I could go to The Daily WTF and see discussions that aren't censored by a hivemind, and a few particularly good comments that have been blessed by the admins to get special notice.

Slashdot's source material is generally better than most other sites, so its post-moderation quality gets a natural boost. Go dive into stories about Aaron Swartz, patents, or the NSA, and count up the mods on different viewpoints. The posts that agree with the hivemind will rarely get "redundant" mods, regardless of whether they actually have new information to add to the discussion. The posts that disagree will often quickly get "offtopic" or "overrated" mods, which slows their progress to higher filtration levels, even if upward mods are eventually added. Posts that insult the dissenter are often modded "funny" or "insightful", depending on how clever their mud-slinging is.

I like the phrasing of the comment above yours. Slashdot's mod system is among the least bad. Let's not assume it's faultless, though.

Don't forget the servers that are overloaded, or have poorly written code. An easy can, check out HP's bloated website. Each page has relatively little content compared to the load times. It's all in the backend processing, which must be massive seeing as how it takes 1/2 to several seconds for the server to process requests for even simple pages.

As the OP said, they're solving the wrong problem. It's not a transport issue, it's design issues. And many websites are rife with horrible design.

Where I work we have a semi-formal Java test we will give to a small room of applying graduate students on some basic CS concepts. If we don't have a formal test, or we think it might be too insulting, we will certainly have a technical expert sit in on the interview with a few questions to try to gauge how well you know your craft.

What's offensive about Worse Than Failure?

This is actually worse than failure. Anyway, this is my first time posting a comment on idle. If you think the comments page is messed up, you should check out the page for posting comments.

The GP was kidding. See the post announcing the namechange.

Sure, and it was all fun and games until "The Daily WTF" was forced to rename by the World Trade Federation.

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/XML_vs_CSV__0x3a__The_Choice_is_Obvious.aspx

Or my personal favourite has some great stories.

Intentional incompatibilities? Have a read of this: http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Faulty-by-Design.aspx

Hooray for Slashdot, where we can always count on people who don't get the joke to "inform" and/or down-mod those who do. Brillant!

Hooray for Slashdot, where we can always count on people who don't get the joke to "inform" and/or down-mod those who do. Brillant!

You probably have a problem with your ad filter settings (adblock or whatever).
but don't feel bad, your not the only person, http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/The_Great_Google_Banner_Ad_Conspiracy_.aspx

Hopefully you didn't find it here

In the worst case they can always teach it to do poetry :p - http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/No,_We_Need_a_Neural_Network.aspx

What happens when the primary, secondary, and tertiary air conditioners all shut down.

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx

steveha

"Beyesian" filtering will be used to filter out those less intelligent than the article authors? Positively iron-clad. This article is a brillant idea, and I'm glad I thought of it.

"You ... altered The Contract" he mumbled.

"No," I corrected him, "I made a few notes on the review copy you gave me; you told me to review it, and so, these are my notes."

"You altered ... The Contract!," he insisted.

"Errm ... no," I didn't know how simplify it further him, "this is not a contract unless we both sign it.

Heh. Just be careful how you go implementing that, or you could wind up with problems like these.

It seems you are not working at the company described in this WTF article...

Well, given the age discrimination that elderly folks face on the internet today, it's no wonder that you turn to porn sites. :P

Regarding the placement of commas, periods and quotes, I just had to share this. http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Its-a-Different-Set-of-Rules.aspx

Company name plz?

For those not already familiar, The Daily WTF is known nowadays as Worse Than Failure - obviously as a SFW backronym, but also as a concept in its own right.

Company name plz?

For those not already familiar, The Daily WTF is known nowadays as Worse Than Failure - obviously as a SFW backronym, but also as a concept in its own right.

You should have pointed out the reference for those who aren't familiar with new boolean techniques.

This belongs to the site formerly known as thedailywtf...

There are a many different ways to measure software.

As programmers, we get very caught up in the concept of "code quality". We truly understand that there is good code and bad code. Shoot, there are websites ( http://worsethanfailure.com/ for example ) devoted to exposing bad code.

However, from the non-programmer's point of view, the value in software is that it solves a problem. If you give something that solves a problem away you are giving away value. Publishing a solution to a problem can often make it easier for someone else to solve the problem. Either of these reduces the value of your solution and therefore directly diminishes the financial value of your venture. Investors don't like this sort of thing.

These are the blatantly obvious reasons that people choose not to release source code.

They've been using this for years to translate instruction manuals.

You're not joking. It is completely worth your time to read this entire image.

Reminds me of a story from The Daily WTF about The Complicator

This http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Injection_Rejection.aspxarticle describes a similar attempt at preventing SQL injection by checking for certain SQL statements. Certain names such as "Seth", "Amanda", and "George" don't work too well...

Wow I've never seen that TimeCube thing before... been reading a while but it just doesn't make sense. Maybe it was translated from another language by the same translator that produced this?

GIVE CONES CHANGE THE MACHINE!!!

• No language that I know of currently allows you to change precedence or associativity of operators. Math with matrices requires different operator precedence. This is a HUGE omission/bug in every language I know of. You can fully parenthesize everything and get past this bug, but that is a kludgy solution at best and fraught with errors.
• Limited number of symbols, Ideally you should be able to use any group of chars as an operator. I think something like "x=1 ... 9;" would be REALLY handy, but alas, I don't know a language that lets you make up your own operators.
• Abuse; It does get abused

And did they find Windows "Longhorn" funny? Especially when the logo was some kind of bull/cow? Or for example Photoshop 6 had the codename "Venus in furs" and a crazy looking cat as the mascot. Not to mention easter eggs which are common even in commercial software.
I think Ubuntu is more serious than for example these guys from HP: http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/1 10484.aspx

This "enterprise" post reminds me of several WTF's. But I link to one in particular:

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Bitten_by_the _Enterprise_Bug.aspx

In general, enterprise has come to mean overpriced and underperforming. By making something "enterprise" your saying you designed it such that you can throw money at the problem. By breaking things into multiple "tiers" your saying that if any one tier gets overloaded, you can fix the problem by throwing money/hardware at that teir.

From my perspective, the best way to solve the performance/reliability problems are with sound design, good programming (algorithims), and careful tool selection. That means architecting your app so that there is no single point of failure. If one node goes down, can the other nodes recover and continue functioning? In the same vein, can you add nodes to the cluster and scale increased loads across more machines without encountering bottlenecks? Its been documented elsewhere, but you want a(n) algorithims, not a(log n) algorithims. All to often the answer to scaling "enterprise" software is buy a bigger box. That can get expensive very fast. The better, albeit more difficult solution is to write the app so that multiple machines can work in concert. And finally, making sure that the tools you use will be able to scale. In general this relates to what database system, and libraries you use (and not so much the language).

I'll address the language issue too. A lot of people have mentioned Erlang. While I think its a great language for server applications, there just isn't the community support to make it a pracitical choice. (Exception, if you don't need libraries or you plan to write _everything_ yourself, as is often the case for embedded systems, then maybe Erlang is a good choice. Hence, why you find Erlang is routers.) Erlang also is problematic because of the small number of people skilled in its use. For me it really comes down to choosing C on Linux, or C# on Windows. (I've written scalable apps, supporting several hundred thousand users using both.) Its a simple fact that it takes less time to write production code in C# (or Java) than in C (or C++). So what you need to ask yourself is whether the efficiency savings of the former outweigh the added development cost of the latter.

One of the apps I wrote is the SMTP/POP/IMAP server used to support my free e-mail service (http://lavabit.com/). For that project, hardware was comparatively expensive (I paid for everything myself), and my time was relatively cheap. (I started by only working on the code in between consulting gigs.) So it made sense to write the app in C, and use Linux. Over time, the efficiency savings have made the decision, while painful at times, the correct one. I'm able to support 70K users very cheaply. If I had chosen C#/Windows, I might have gotten the project done faster, but I'd need more expensive hardware. (I'm using Dell 1650's at the application tier, with beefier machines at the database/storage tier. Note, I have a two tier architecture.) I would also have had to shell out lots of dollars for Windows licenses. It just didn't make sense. For more on my mail server, read this other post http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191034&cid=157 11157.

Another large project I worked on was a social networking site sponsored by a large carbonated beverage firm. In this case the pockets were deeper but the timeline was shorter. So it made sense to write the app in C#. In reminds me of the saying that in software development you have three factors: cost, quality and time. You get to pick two of those, but not three.

I'll close by saying again, the best way to solve the performance/reliability problems are with sound design, good programming (algorithims), and careful tool selection.

The interesting part is he is not in trouble for doing it, he's in trouble for telling people what to delete and providing a program that automates the simple procedure that could be accomplished in regedit. It's dangerously close to a free speech issue.

If I tell you "run regedit and delete the key named blah blah" it is clearly speech. I could play semantics games by telling you the software creates key blah blah to keep you from printing unlimited copies and leave you to draw the one natural conclusion. However, that would mean that serious criminal charges or not are nothing but a matter of semantics. The whole thing creates a big grey area where free speech should be a clear cut matter.

If I list for you a command line that would perform the action, is that a DMCA violation? What if I stick that line in a seperate file and link to it? What if I call that file "unlimited.bat". At what point in that process did I become a felon subject to (and deserving of) having my entire life turned upside down and flushed down the tubes? How about if I write a spyware registry cleaner that happens to delete the very same key? What if it's in my "big list of registry keys you're better off without"?

Perhaps more challenging, what if I write up a paragraph about it for my "stupidly ineffective security measures" page? (or for WTF?)

Note that this is all talking about the procedure, not actually doing it and redeeming more than one coupon.

You should see what Firefox does when it encounters "Buckinghamshire"...

Yes they have this massive WTF on there website script! http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/1 27881.aspx

Link to forum thread

Great - I've been hearing a lot about C-Pound.

It might vary per server. I saw this story somewhere else and .info wasn't on the "full list" from someone who actually hacked a client to ask the server for the whole list

http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/18/ShowF orum.aspx

http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t =157&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

"image001.png" is blocked - because no-one ever uses a filename for something other than what someone else has used that filename for, no matter HOW generic it is, once someone's used a filename it's "taken" forever and always refers to that one evil exploit it was used for.

It appears ChaCha is Very Quality

It reminds me of one of failed DotBomb era projects.

Web 0.1, perhaps? ;)

Hashing it is just so cool.
http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Classics-Week -How-Not-to-Parse-Command-Line-Arguments.aspx

I tend to put an appropriate verb on the "OK" button, but standardize on using "Cancel". In your later example, then, I'd have "Don't Convert" and "Cancel". "Cancel" always means "STOP! I'VE CHANGED MY MIND! JUST TAKE ME BACK TO WHERE I WAS BEFORE I SELECTED THAT OPTION!"

However, there's a fun example of this taken too far at The Daily WTF.

I tend to put an appropriate verb on the "OK" button, but standardize on using "Cancel". In your later example, then, I'd have "Don't Convert" and "Cancel". "Cancel" always means "STOP! I'VE CHANGED MY MIND! JUST TAKE ME BACK TO WHERE I WAS BEFORE I SELECTED THAT OPTION!"

However, there's a fun example of this taken too far at The Daily WTF.

Point taken. It's true that backwards-compability fetishes result in some interesting success stories, too. I mean check this one out. Emulator piled on top of VM piled on top of emulator dating back to 1973. Freakin' amazing.