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Admin
Wouldn't it make more sense for the developer to just write the application correctly? Shouldn't this be a non-issue if the application used transactions properly?
So if some of your users (hackers) desperately tried to work around your anti-XSS feature, would you say it needs to be changed to make it easier for them to launch an attack? Despite the cliche, the user isn't always right. Especially when talking about things designed to protect the system from users like security or auditability features.
Admin
Reminds me of a story. Many years ago, we had someone from France a few years my junior stay over for a few weeks during the summer holidays. For whatever reason, as a kid I liked having a password-protected screensaver on my PC. There was nothing to hide and no-one to hide from, but it was fun I suppose. I have a feeling the password was "Sarek" at the time but it's been years.
This other kid was a big fan of X-Wing. I was doing some work on the computer when he got up. I went downstairs to the toilet and returned to find him playing X-Wing on my PC.
The screensaver was active at the time, so he'd decided simply to crash out of all my work, reboot and start a game without even asking!
Admin
This almost exactly, and eerily coincidentally, describes my day at work today.
No, I don't work at a bank (whew) and software is in-house and can be fixed quickly (double-whew)
Admin
Yeah, i thought the "6000 years" part was 'The Real WTF(tm)' in this article...
Admin
Have you never asked the teller "can I have $200 in ten-dollar bills, please"? What the system thinks is the best combination of notes/coins to give the customer and what the teller actually does can be quite different. Remember that this is a banking application, which should follow some additional rules - I'd be very reluctant to bank at a place where the tellers have free reign on the processes that their computers run.
Having said that, the bank should have gone for Linux workstations for its tellers with a suitably locked-down interface. :)
Admin
This demonstrates very nicely why I detest doing any form of "support".
Users are idiots....but only when it suits them. Had this happened to me, I'd have an enourmous urge to smack someone behind the head. What I aspecially LOVE about this article, is how the user explain the "bug", as if what they're doing is the most normal thing under the sun. "What? Lot's of applications require you to use alt-ctrl-del as part of its normal process flow. How were we supposed to know we shouldn't be doing it this way???"
I'd much rather spend 3 hours investigating an ACTUAL code bug, that 1 hour investing a user issue. At least with a code bug, you know the issue is real, and there's some logical reason for it.
Admin
Oh the delicious irony -- I think you meant "will never err" :)
Admin
Though I followed this debate, this is hardly the place. But is we MUST have this debate here, let's get it over with quickly.
Evolusion is stupid
No, Creationism is stupid.
No, Evolution.
Is not.
Are too.
Is not.
Are too.
Scene ends with the two parties grabbing each others throughts.
Case closed.
(Ironically, the CAPTCHA Test word for this post was "darwin". Go figure)
Admin
"Second and probably most important: if your users are desperate to work around a piece of the program, then that piece of the program needs to be changed. Management may have mandated something, but management doesn't know their head from their ass.
I fight this battle against management nearly every day and I have never seen a case where management was right. You need to make software for the people who are using it, not for management who will never touch it, ever. "
A contracter might have the luxury of fighting the pointy haired management of his/her clients, but many developers can't do that, nor should they.
After all, it's not our job to fight the political fights of OTHER companies. We're developers, not mediators. Why can't the USERS fight their own fights with THEIR management? THEY should be the ones who tell THEIR management if something should be changed.
I, as a developer can only suggest things to THEIR management, but if they're going to insist on being STUPID, then I'm not going to bite the hand that signs my cheque.
Developers develop. Managers manage. If developers develop badly, they should take the blame. If management manage badly, then I sure as hell am not responsible for their stupidity too.
Admin
Did you mean grabbing each others thoughts? very profound
Admin
Users are really surprising, but we can learn a lot from them. We need to pay attention to just how clever they are, and keep a step or two ahead of them. At the same time, we can take a note of their ingenuity and apply the same dangers and cautions to ourselves. I've written about it.
Admin
So what are you really saying? showing off? What's wrong with VB frontend?
Admin
a) Obviously the clercs are at fault for knowingly giving the customers money without completing the transaction. b) You could add a flag that is set on opening the dialog and reset on closing. If it's set when the application starts, report the clerc. c) But clercs can give money to customers without completing a transaction by not starting it in the first place as well. d) So if your clercs really are this untrustworthy, you simply have to count all the money in the drawers and fire anyone whose totals don't match up. And before you fire them, let one of the more explosive managers (every organization has them) yell at them for a while, in front of the other clercs.
And I don't buy for a second that the clercs didn't know that they were giving money away. They probably only opened the dialogs only in a half-assed attempt at an excuse. That is not to say they were giving money away because they like stealing from their employers - I think that they just hated the new dialog. But that's no excuse.
Admin
Only in the Windoze world. Everywhere else, they already were standard 30 years before Win98.
Admin
Admin
The Creationist talk was obviously a joke. It's incredible how hard it is for some people to spot sarcasm in writing...
Admin
Wonderful example for an interesting presentation I recently saw at a conference. It listed the top 10 reasons why software development projects fail. "Isufficient involvement of end users" was the second most common reason (the most common was insufficient support from top management).
Admin
Except in the situation where (Time & Effort to C-A-D and restart program) < (Time & Effort to use program properly) < (Time & Effort to do a hard reboot).
Admin
Admin
IT is a race between programmers developing better idiot proof programming, and the universe creating bigger idiots.
So far, the universe is winning.
Admin
Admin
Of course you can, don't give the customer his cash. The banker grabbing the bills out of the machine is not the last thing to happen in the physical transaction, virtually every bank also requires them to give some form of receipt (unless this 'bank' is really run out of a back ally). That receipt should not even be computer until after the logical transaction has completed.
Admin
Yes. The users will then proceed to trip the fuse.
Admin
That's just amazing... job I worked at before I had to specifically build in all kinds of code to handle users trying to subvert the process - like preventing events from occurring.
The funny thing was that even after doing my best to handle such events, I still had to build in further measures to check if something wasn't right (like that) after-the-fact and not let the user continue until they finished what they were initially prompted for.
Always interesting because the software dev person/team usually is the first to be blamed for an issue such as this, when the users (or mgmt or team coordinating implementation, etc.) never would consider first that maybe its the "process" they have chosen which may require some modification! :)
Admin
Thanks, but don't need your help on that one. My bank up and decided all on its own to stop collecting my home insurance mortgage escrow two years ago. I asked the agent to please tell me who authorized that, and was told, "Nobody." Then why the policy change? "There has been no policy change." Then why wasn't the escrow collected? "Computer error."
Admin
Only creationists argue like this. Evolutionist are further evolved.
Admin
Yes, deep down I want to destroy all COBOL lol really I do
Admin
Well, in the MMO world users that bypass the system are... dismissed regardless of if we faithfully pay for a service that is nothing like what we really want
btw, evilution rocks and take your hands off my throat
Admin
Those ATMs still say the same thing today and I'm sure I'm not the only customer who has been alarmed by this bit of tech-speak confusion.
Admin
ROFL! This, my IT friends, is not an end-user or programming WTF, but it is a classic WTF none-the-less. This is a processes and procedures WTF. This is a management lockdown WTF.
Notice that the reason why this dialog existed in the first place: Management wanted increased controls on getting the money transfer correct. So what do they do? They implement a captcha system! Seriously. That is what that dialog box was designed to do. Now granted, in the story this sounds like a legitimate thing to do because we're talking about money, about a big bank accounting system, hundreds of users possibly, and the list goes on. But really, it all boils down to management wanting a software system that does their job for them: make sure their people are not being sloppy.
You'll never eliminate user errors. I am a process engineer from experience, as well as an IT Business Analyst by both experience and schooling. Just like programming, 80% of a defined business process involvs working around the exceptions to the standard flow of the process. It just kills me when I see pointy-haired management trying to squeeze all their workers into an automated software system, as if they can eliminate human error. If a human is in the equation, there WILL BE errors!
The real WTF is that this bank was led by management that thought that double-inspecting any transaction over $1000 (or whatever the true amount was) somehow eliminated errors. (as evidenced by the frantic: "We have to stop this!" approach by the business analyst girl who didn't even fight back to tell management that THEY need to stop their people from subverting the software by rebooting the computer, nor that THEY need to be more direct with the individuals that screw up the transactions in the first place rather than implementing a stupid dialog box to double-inspect that they did it right the first time... what a waste of the teller's - and the customer's - time!)
Admin
well, they don't need to, do they? After all, the people in the back room already "know" everything about what the people on the front lines do. if they didn't they wouldn't be in the back room, would they?
Admin
I used to work for large bank in the South. I was the DBA for a client-server app that telemarketers used to sign people up for small business loans. One day I noticed some weirdness in the daily status report-- a terminated employee's worklist of incomplete credit apps was shrinking!?! I investigated and found that one of the telemarketers had discovered that suffixing a bad password with single quote (SQL injection hack) allowed him to open other people's worklists. I quickly notified the developer and the sales managers about the vulnerability, and they got it fixed quick enough. What surprised me was that in literally hours the hack had spread to almost half of the 50 person telemarketing staff (I am assuming the other half was too dense or too unpopular to be told).
I think this kind of thing is stronger than "an oral tradition" because it gains the teller of the tale more than just satisfaction of telling the tale.
Admin
Re: the creationism thing
Sarcasm, jokes, it doesn't matter.
Think of all the blonde jokes you've heard. Or the jokes about southerners. Jokes can be damaging because they sneak into our subconscious. Think about the jokes you've heard about some stereotype, and how your immediate perception of those stereotypes is affected.
This article referenced "6,000 years" specifically. It would be different if he used a more generic "thousands of years" or "tens of thousands", because it just implies "a long time ago". But specifying 6,000, which happens to be the number specified by the Creationist groups, lends an implicit credibility to the number. It was only mentioned in passing, used as a flavorful enhancement to the sentence.
It's the implicit acceptance we grant it, the "oh, that's too small of a thing to argue over" phenomena. Those little things build up steam and become bigger things. Creationists gather strength from the fact that most people are too apathetic to argue the points with them.
There's plenty of reliable research and experimentation that's been done that proves the earth is well over 6,000 years old [even Carbon-dating, which the creationist movmement touts as "not accurate beyond a few thousand years" is reasonably accurate up to just over 50,000 years! Archaeologists use other means of radiometric dating now, such as Uranium-Thorium, which is accurate for a lot longer due to a lengthier half-life].
Anyways. Back to work.
Admin
As suggested in another post, if this dialog holds such high importance, then upon abandoning and restarting the application, it should take the user right back to the same dialog where it left off. If management really does know better (which is suspect here), then these suspended transactions and restarts should be logged and reported to management.
Admin
"Follow the instructions on page 5" "Uh, those instructions have been crossed through" "Follow those instructions anyway, those are the correct ones." (sic); Transcript of a discussion preceeding the catestrophic failiure of Reactor IV at Chenobyl.
You'd be astonished how often instructions and advice involves words like "oh ignore that warning". It only takes one guy who seems to know a lot about computers, and everyone will listen to them... and it'll propogate from office to office as "oh the guys at ... found a way round that."
Presumably this was only used to monitor the desposition of denominations in the till rather than the actual amounts of cash in the accounts?
Admin
I think you've forgotten the part of the story where the user has just walked out of the bank with $200 in 2x$50, 3*$20 and 4x$10 in their pocket. You don't want to cancel that. Maybe cancelling the transaction that just manages the cash stock levels would be enough, but that's happening when the user ctrl-alt-deletes the application anyway. You would end up thinking that there is more money available than there actually was however.
Hopefully there was a running total of withdrawals/deposits as well, so even if they lost track of the amounts of individual denominations, they would at least have a clue about the total amount of money available.
Admin
I would first talk to the people doing it and find out why. It could be a process error that means they are in an impossible situation. If it's simply for time-savings, I would make the dialog note the fact that it's running and what's been filled in. If it's killed it comes right back except with an extra box. It will not submit until a text field has been filled in with "I will not abuse the system again."
Admin
I actually had a customer request that I disable the ability for visitors to close their web browser. I smiled and said sure, that will be a $10 million enhancement. They declined.
Admin
For user that don't understand the difference between the sum were diff between the real life cash total (cashier box) and the virtualized cash total ( logged cashier box content in software ).
This issue cannot be solved by transaction, but either by annoying the user until he/she complete the input (mark entries as invalid in the database and re-ask for completion if any), or by suppressing the dialog box ( the latter was apparently used ) .
But I agree with the point that show how user can break software if they find it annoying.
Admin
Any properly designed database (SQL or otherwise) should mark its mid-transaction state on disk as dirty. So, an unfinished transaction will still be known when the machine reboots. The database must be able to roll back, even after a power failure.
Admin
If you consider the idiot programmers too, the sane and rational just don't have a chance.
Admin
Evolution and Creation. A fun topic to fight about. Funny how we make assumptions about what an evolutionist believes, and what a creationist believes.
Darwin actually only discussed the changes that occur within a species. Birds could be similar, but have different shaped beaks, wings, and feet. This was proposed at a time when people believed that flies grew out of garbage, crocodiles were formed from the mud of the Nile, and sea turtles spontaneously generated out of ocean sand. Things became a bit more complicated when it was discovered that, literally, you cannot have a chick without an egg, and you cannot have an egg without a chicken. This is why scientists keep trying to form life (Give my creation LIFE!!!) out of water, minerals, and electricity. They have not yet succeeded. There are also scientists that have raised numerous generations of fruit flies, combining their genes in convoluted ways. Yet, they are still fruit flies.
I will not assume that an evolutionist believes that crocodiles grow out of Nile mud, nor will I assume that a creationist thinks that the earth is a mere 6000 years old. I've seen rocks dug up that seemed to have human footprints alongside dinosaur footprints. Doesn't mean they lived at the same time. Haven't seen a whole lot of proof of much of what we believe about the geologic record, but seen a lot of theorizing and guessing.
Darwinic Evolution is an idea, a hypothesis. Believing that there is a god that has created life is an idea, a hypothesis. Neither of them is subject to running tests on (unless the fruit flies suddenly become something other than fruit flies), hence, neither of them fall under scientific method. Both evolution and creationism are belief systems. For my part, I don't see that it makes any difference which one people believe in.
But does make for good arguments.
Admin
WTF? Can't you people take a joke?
I mean, I just got used to the idea of not ignoring these creationists anymore, and laughing at them instead. Are you telling me we're at the point where we fight them?
When do they win?
Admin
Ctrl + Shift + Esc also brings up the task manager :)
Admin
"Every year when Santa loads up his sleigh with presents..."
Referring to a myth in jest certainly does not increase its credibility among an adult population. Stop being so defensive - by not joking about it you prevent the integration of the myth into our social consciousness as a myth, providing the ignorant out there with less context in which to evaluate the truth of the statement.
Wow - sorry - that last sentence sounded like a product of some kind of thesis generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo), but my point remains (if you can find it)
Admin
As mentioned several times before, the transaction being rolled back doesn't help. While the transaction is rolled back in the database, it's not rolled back in real life -- the teller's just handed the customer $500, reducing their till from $5000 to $4500. However, when the db transaction rolls back, the db thinks the teller still has $5000. Hence the discrepancy.
Admin
Let's be clear doing things correctly costs more did you not see the word BANK
Admin
I just want to ask... do you guys really think the average programmer even knows what a transaction is? Do they teach you about ROLLBACK, COMMINT and the way Microsoft implemented tranactions in .net at fooBar school mass programmer output?
I mean I work at a place where the think SQL strings are faster than stored procedures and that opening a database connection in an object constructor is a good thing... no they don't use any transactions either....
Admin
Admin
The real WTF is all the people who blindly equate creationists with those who believe the earth is 6000 years old. In fact, these are two completely separate ideas. Creationism teaches that a God created the universe. Young earth creationists believe that this creation was 6000-10000 years ago. In fact, young earth creationists make up a minority of creationists in general.
There is nothing incompatible with creationism and most aspects of evolution. You can choose not to believe in a God. I choose to believe in a God. This debate, however, is completely separate from the debate over the age of the Universe.
I'd like to add, too, that I grew up being taught in a young earth -- somewhere between 6000 and 10000 years old. But now as I look at the scientific evidence, I am finding that an old earth (several hundred million years) is more and more probable. This change in no way affects my belief in a God. I find that scientific evidence does in fact point to the existence of a God.