Comment On I'm not Null, I'm a Human Being!

how did Joe's new year pic get up during Jan? I thoguht normally it take 6 month to get something actually looked at by ze power zat be....

And how exactly does Jon Klein know that his user name is not a zero length string?

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Ah but if a string is zero length it must point to a null. Well unless it a bstr like structure of some kind anyway.

NaN:

And how exactly does Jon Klein know that his user name is not a zero length string?

It says "Not null?" at the bottom.

null for null until null? Guess that means the universe will cease existing, and time as we know it will cease.

Guess I should bring my umbrella.

IGOR!!!!! It's alive....the CPU, IT'S ALIVE!!!!!

Jon Klein:

Xfinity's website seems to think that I'm 'null'

The first thing that came to mind was: developers who use a language that dumps a null value as a 'null' string should disallow 'null' as a user name in their registration form. Otherwise an innovative user could drive the poor folks at helldesk crazy :-(

Planet:

That would make a great T-Shirt:

If you see this message
THE CPU IS WORKING!

If you see this message
IT IS LAUNDRY DAY

would be better!

This reminds me of a certain Web 2.0 site where user-pages have URLs of the form "username.domain.com". The main page is "www.domain.com".

Attempting to create an account with the username "www" gives a generic "this name is already in use" error, so I couldn't determine whether someone actually did that and brought the system to its knees, but it's a nice thought.

I'm still contemplating making an account with the name "goatse.cx#", to check their escaping.

John:

Ah but if a string is zero length it must point to a null.

Nope, because NUL != NULL

Walgreens is just preparing the next generation of emergency alert systems. In the not to distant future the message "THE CPU IS WORKING" will strike fear in us all.

If the CPU is used directly to generate the signals to drive the LED matrix, when the CPU crashes, the display goes blank or with funny patterns.

So the display makes sense.

In ReBoot (the TV series) they actually had Null storms, or at least Null attacks.

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

Not only the CPU, the sign also seems to be working!

I wonder what they mean by CPU, many people still think that its the big metal box you plug the keyboard into.

Agreed! I might take you up on that idea. That'd be hilarious!

I loved that show when I was younger. Haven't seen it in years.

Evo:

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

Don't try an rationalize it. The truth is Symantec is a steaming pile of crap. It's not some (not so) clever indication that it's off, but set to be on when it can be turned on. It's just crap programmers writing shitty software that only continues to exist because of big corporate customers where nobody has the balls to stick their neck out and change to something that doesn't suck.

faoileag:

Jon Klein:

Xfinity's website seems to think that I'm 'null'

The first thing that came to mind was: developers who use a language that dumps a null value as a 'null' string should disallow 'null' as a user name in their registration form. Otherwise an innovative user could drive the poor folks at helldesk crazy :-(

Back in the early '90s, when FidoNet was big, people found out that you could create a user named All. If you replied to this person in private e-mail, everyone could read it. Or something like that. Also, every message addressed to "All" users would show up as new when you logged in.

Anon:

Evo:

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

Don't try an rationalize it. *snip*

Well, obviously you don't...

Evo:

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

No, this is Symantec. They're just finally being honest that having their software turned off is a good thing. The real WTF is that the other two components show red when they're turned off.

My son has a t-shirt: "Cloak of Visibility. If you can see me, it's working."

Rodnas:

If you see this message
IT IS LAUNDRY DAY

would be better!

I've seen a shirt saying ONE MORE DAY AND I WOULD BE NAKED.

Most people don't know this, but Walgreen's has a wide variety of SkyNet machines. Aisle 5.

Evo:

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

Even if this were true, that's a horrible way to display it. Event automatically switching it off would be a LOT better, but how about indicating it by switching it to grey and/or changing the wording to indicate such.

I occasionally see that time zone problem, maybe in Wikipedia or something like that.

Where they report the time that you did something, but don't show you the time zone so it takes a minute of head scratching to realize that its where ever the server is.

'Joe Reynolds wrote, "Discovered while trying to update my profile on New Years Day. Apparently, The world really DID end in 2012, but LinkedIn was the only one to notice."'

Not really a Worse Than Fail. A lot of websites use the local system's clock to do things like populate year dropdowns. The year changes at different times around the world and the server you were connected to was probably in a different timezone. If you waited until Jan 3, 2013 and it still said 2012, that would be a WTF because someone at LinkedIn would have hardcoded the values of the dropdown into the form when they should have automated it.

The fact that dates change at different times around the world is TRWTF. That causes havoc on us programmers who have to write code for a global audience. For example, Steam works around the issue by having deals expire 12 to 24 hours later than they would like them to.

JoeCool:

Evo:

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

Even if this were true, that's a horrible way to display it. Event automatically switching it off would be a LOT better, but how about indicating it by switching it to grey and/or changing the wording to indicate such.

Switching it off is a horrible idea. Imagine turning the other two off and on again, and suddenly that features switches off automatically without you noticing it. Woops.
Yes, there are better ways to display it. Grey would be better. But I wouldn't really consider it a massive WTF if this was the case.

Sounds like Symantec being turned ON is the real problem here. They just forgot to make the other two icons green when off.

Evo:

What if "Proactive threat protection" only functions when "Antivirus and antispyware protection" or "Network threat protection" is turned on? It makes sense, and then it can be switched off while it's still really set to be turned on. In that case the "off" would mean it's not functioning, but the green would mean the user has still configured it to be turned on. Makes more sense than not showing any difference as to whether the user has set it to on or off, or even worse: automatically switch the preference to 'off'.

That might be a sensible way for the system to behave, but the display is still idiotic. If there are really three states -- "On", "Off", and "File not found", oops, I mean "configured but not currently running" -- the intelligent thing to do is not to display these values as green "on", red "off", and green "off". That would be highly cryptic. Even the experienced user would have to guess at what it means -- as you're doing here. The sensible thing would be to come up with a word to at least give a hint at the third state other than "on" or "off", like "available" or "waiting" or some such.

I just checked, and in SEP 11.0 (looks the same as pictured) disabling both Antivirus Protection and Network Threat Protections leaves Proactive Threat Protection turned on, colored green, and with the text set to "On".

So, that's not it...

Evo:

Yes, there are better ways to display it. Grey would be better. But I wouldn't really consider it a massive WTF if this was the case.

Greyed out (but still saying "On" if that's otherwise the right state) would definitely be better, as that would say "this is all irrelevant right now, but if you switched something else on then this would also be on".

TRWTF is that a significant proportion of the population is Red/Green colorblind and so would miss out on this mystery…

doconnor:

In ReBoot (the TV series) they actually had Null storms, or at least Null attacks.

And Starscream has had a Null Ray as one of his weapons since forever.

Mike:

If the CPU is used directly to generate the signals to drive the LED matrix, when the CPU crashes, the display goes blank or with funny patterns.

I'm 99% certain that said display was made by the company I work at. I'm also 75% certain that the controllers that go into those displays have never been programmed with that particular message. So, I'm lead to believe that someone intentionally put that there.

As for what happens when the CPU crashes - the modules (the pieces that hold the LEDs) will hold the last image for a certain amount of time (~6 seconds IIRC) and then blank.

I am not null, I'm a free man!

Personally, I'd go for this on a shirt:

This is a test message
If you see this message
THE PRINTER IS WORKING

Clearly the Norton knows that it's off, and that that is a good thing for computer performance.

Your Name:

Personally, I'd go for this on a shirt:

This is a test message
If you see this message
THE PRINTER IS WORKING

PC LOAD T-SHIRT

BBCode being disabled is not an error, it's the completion of a feature request!

PiisAWheeL:

I am not null, I'm a free man!

The mis-quote was bugging the hell out of me too.

I immediately thought the same thing, about the server being located in another timezone. In fact, this mistake could have easily been mine.

However, the fact that dates change at different times in different places is not easily changed, nor would it be desirable to do so (or would you like to come into work in the middle of the night simply because someone decided that it *is* 9 am? > <).

The clocks of servers and other appliances like routers and firewalls, should all be set to the same time zone, preferably UTC (GMT with no daylight saving). This eliminates the added effort in figuring out what happened when, especially important when trying to quickly diagnose an outage or a security breach. It also saves programmers a lot of effort, like you pointed out.

In the case of the LinkedIn form however, for some reason, the user must input a date manually, which means that the website obviously can't just use the current server time (either a past or future event), and the user's perspective on time suddenly becomes an issue. Depending on what kind of event's date LinkedIn is trying to establish and where it is used, it might be converted to server time automatically, so the user doesn't have to worry about the time zone the server is in, and LinkedIn can pretend that we all live in one time zone. This kind of routine works brilliantly, except for the fact that someone forgot to include the user's time zone in the equation for generating the year dropdown. That means that the translation between user time and server time is broken in one way: when translating server time to user time...

This might only be a problem one day every year, but to me it seems like a classic example you would use to introduce novice programmers to the intricacies of processing dates.

At a previous company which sold retail books on the Internet, I set my real account password to start with '<' and end with '>', and customer service was unable to see my password for the site. Really. First clip made me think of it, because that's precisely how it would appear in the customer service interface.

I had a real sense of Deja Vu with some of these....

Why do you need to update something to 2013 on LinkedIn on NY day? In most of the world, it's a public holiday, so any qualification would have been granted BEFORE (no?)....

I wonder what gets displayed when the CPU is NOT working

Re SYMANTEC - kinda shows why GUI's are crap - because people make assumptions about colors and pictures meaning stuff.

Bah humbug, weak as piss WTF this one....

The real WTF is Symantec and their junk. Only reason they still exist is because of the corporate market and because they pay big OEMs big money to ship even crappier "trial" versions of their software on the OEM PCs.

I am sooooo gonna use this. Thank you. And sorry. And thank you.

I'm glad somebody got a picture of that Walgreens sign. I drive past it every day and for the last 6 months of 2012 it was like that. Recently, though (in particular when I went to photograph it myself), it's been turned off.

Besides that message, there were several more test screens, including one that flashed every pixel on, and one that looked like:
1111111111111111111111
2222222222222222222222
3333333333333333333333
4444444444444444444444

Hey John, we at Comcast are interested in how you did that. Send me an email at joshua_knarr@comcast.com if you would be so kind.