• (cs) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    So, did our little domestic spammer finally stop?
    Eh? That's not what I typed.
  • (cs) in reply to anonymous235

    True.

    anonymous235:
    JM:
    It was one email that replied to and quoted the other. Like this.

    Salad Dressing:
    Why did you display the unit test e-mails out of order like that? That's both strange and odd.
    The fun starts when people start mixing both systems.
    Very true.
  • (cs) in reply to asdfg
    asdfg:
    FrostCat:
    It would be interesting to know what the Oracle docs that were being browsed were--if it's, say, Java docs, then there's not really any good reason not to download the docs and host them locally to avoid the network usage.
    This is exactly the problem that a caching proxy (e.g. squid) is designed to solve.
    It has become apparent that many of the Application Development staff are regularly using the squid caching proxy during work hours, consuming large amounts of intranet bandwidth.

    Since this is negatively impacting nap time, this proxy has been blocked, effective immediately.

  • (cs) in reply to chubertdev
    chubertdev:
    Your Name:
    Well we can see the Akismet spam filter is right on top of things, as always. :P

    Don't worry, it prevents us from ever linking to SO.

    Why would akismet prevent us from creating really sick links to stackoverflow?

  • The Real Folk Blues (unregistered)

    Helen Cole? Wow, her health really has taken a turn for the worse if she can only promise $2.50 now. Last I knew, she promised me a few million dollars if I could help her smuggle it out of Nigeria to keep it away from the corrupt politicians before she died of terminal brain rot...

  • (cs)

    Wow, so not only does that place filter the internet, they automatically block sites based on usage, and don't even have any exceptions for sites that legitimately need to be accessed frequently. And their excuse is limited bandwidth, which is either an outright lie or an even bigger WTF. Glad I don't work there.

  • saepius (unregistered) in reply to lolwtf
    lolwtf:
    Wow, so not only does that place filter the internet, they automatically block sites based on usage
    Nowhere does it say it was done automatically.
  • (cs) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    I love the unit tests one. My supervisor did that 5 years ago. He made some changes and the unit tests didn't pass, so rather than "do the right thing", he commented out all the unit tests. We never recovered from that. Apparently "the clients didn't want to pay for unit tests" (the clients don't know what a unit test is). But now they're paying for costly maintenance whenever they want some changes (which is... all the time).
    And which way gets you a longer contract duration and therefore more money?
  • Cheong (unregistered)

    If the routing is to be changed during the maintenance mentioned in the first email, the network may disconnect and it's right for them to send email to notify users before the change.

    So I think it's not an WTF.

  • Cheong (unregistered) in reply to Cheong

    Oh it's the Alaiowaska, I should have read the description before posting.

  • Stuart (unregistered)

    Comments funnier than article. Would make good article for slow week.

  • eVil (unregistered)

    Oh nevermind, I guess I just didn't know what trolling is.

  • Brad (unregistered)

    Blocking oracle docs would not inhibit developer productivity. It's been years now, but when I worked with Oracle databases, I was astounded at how bad their documentation was. I don't think I ever found anything useful. Maybe it's better now, but at that time, I was seething with anger and frequenting "hate oracle" sites.

    The high-activity to that site was prolly because the dev/dba could never find what he/she needed.

  • Engineer who needs docs (unregistered)

    Captcha solved it all :) (esse): Hey, esse, REAL engineers don't need any stinkin docs.

  • Raven Darke (unregistered)

    Alaiowaska is a typo. It should read Ayahuasca.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Brad
    Brad:
    Blocking oracle docs would not inhibit developer productivity. It's been years now, but when I worked with Oracle databases, I was astounded at how bad their documentation was. I don't think I ever found anything useful. Maybe it's better now, but at that time, I was seething with anger and frequenting "hate oracle" sites.

    The high-activity to that site was prolly because the dev/dba could never find what he/she needed.

    As for the Java API docs, they are pretty awesome... maybe database docs suck.

  • Mikey A. (unregistered) in reply to JWBS

    That's why they are called Sun servers of course.

  • rio (unregistered)

    We need more Quoted-Printable in those e-mails. Or any other way that reduces the line lengths to ~76 characters.

    I don't want to scroll horizontally just to read a paragraph.

    (Why on earth do e-mail clients that don't restrict line length by default exist, anyway? Can we murder their developers?)

  • Casey (unregistered)

    I remember dealing with idiot Germans and that POS SAP.

    We always had problems with production after they refreshed test. That's because those lazy SOBs were migrating all their changes into production so they didn't have to re-import them into test.

  • (cs)

    re: MUMPS: I once worked for a company - a large (albeit defunct) telecom - that had a pair of provisioning and circuit databases named WARTS and SORES.

  • harryhashtable (unregistered) in reply to LLC
    LLC:
    MUMPS stands for "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System" and is a legitimate programming language. It's an older language but most programmers that have worked in the medical field know about it. Their question is a legitimate question. They are asking how to connect to a database (MUMPS can do this) and return a record set. They just don't know how to do it.

    MUMPS or M as it's been rebranded as, maybe an actual language, but it's not legitimate and belongs in the dustbin of history.

  • Daniel (unregistered) in reply to JWBS

    We actually did have a Sun server admin that was fun to prank whenever there were solar flares. We told him "some sort of problem with one tiny wire in a controller chip being too thin." Before he came in, I'd check a solar flare site and if the sun was having a bad day, I'd mess around on the server, giving it a bad day too. Never had the heart to tell the guy it was only a prank.

    Jus' messin' wit'cha. :D

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    I got some weird layout issues with this site with Chrome.

    On the left is a Content navigator and an ad below that. To the right is the main content area. These both fill the entire screen. No horizontal scroll bar.

    But for each of the quoted emails, they appear in a floating div that extends a few hundred pixels off to the right. This means I need to scroll the window area sideways to see the WTFs.

    The majority of layout is good, just the quoted WTFs seem screwy.

  • JustSomeGuy (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I always love the Unit Test ones like that.

    Dev: The tests are failing, what do we do? Idiot Boss: We can't ship with failing tests. Turn them off so they will all pass. Dev: WTF?!

    And the classic note left by the overnight operators:

    Bob, we ran out of tapes during the overnight backup so we just reused the first one.

    WTF? Seriously, WTFF?

    Captcha: Vuplutate: to remove a sensitive part of the female anatomy?

  • JustSomeGuy (unregistered) in reply to Brad
    Brad:
    Blocking oracle docs would not inhibit developer productivity. It's been years now, but when I worked with Oracle databases, I was astounded at how bad their documentation was. I don't think I ever found anything useful. Maybe it's better now, but at that time, I was seething with anger and frequenting "hate oracle" sites.

    The high-activity to that site was prolly because the dev/dba could never find what he/she needed.

    I suspect the doco was written by the same idiots who decided an empty string and NULL were the same thing :-)

  • Per (unregistered) in reply to JWBS
    JWBS:
    We actually did have some Sun servers of a specific model that went wonky whenever there were solar flares. Some sort of problem with one tiny wire in a controller chip being too thin. Before I came in I'd check a solar flare site and if the sun was having a bad day, sure as shootin' those servers would be having a bad day too. The correlation was too strong to be pure chance.
    We had them to. At first SUN refused to admit there was a more general problem so they kept sending replacement CPU:s, lots of them. The servers (tower, not rack) were heavy and I had to lift them in and out of the shelf several times every day. We had like 40 quads or something. It was the L2 cache that was faulty, a tech told me afterwards.
  • (cs) in reply to LLC
    LLC:
    MUMPS stands for "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System" and is a legitimate programming language.

    You probably missed the bit where the email was sent to TDWTF... Probably because, if you Google for MUMPS programming, TDWTF is in the top few sites that come up - because of several articles about the wonders of MUMPS, and because no one else actually uses it. So, TDWTF is probably the font of all knowledge about MUMPS as far as Google is concerned.

    Now that this article has been written as well, TDWTF will probably be even higher up the search results ranking, so TDWTF Towers should expect to get even more 'give me teh Mumps codez' emails shortly.

  • wrojr (unregistered) in reply to JWBS

    You must be kidding that SUN servers had problems with SOLAR flares...

  • Kasper (unregistered) in reply to anonymous235
    anonymous235:
    No, the real fun starts when people start writing their reply within the quoted section.
    JM:
    It was one email that replied to and quoted the other. Like this.
    Salad Dressing:
    Why did you display the unit test e-mails out of order like that? That's both strange and odd.
    The fun starts when people start mixing both systems.
  • Curt Rostenbach (unregistered)

    I wrote a credit card accepting system for my former employer. After it was installed in production, I logged on and entered a test payment of $5000.00 using a credit card that had a $300.00 limit. In the comment field I wrote "--TEST--TEST--TEST--DO NOT PROCESS--DO NOT PROCESS--" Later in the day, our customer service calls me saying my card was declined, followed five minutes later by the credit card company asking if I was in possession of my card since a charge outside of usual buying pattern had been submitted and declined.

  • Tux "Tuxedo" Penguin (unregistered) in reply to JWBS
    JWBS:
    We actually did have some Sun servers of a specific model that went wonky whenever there were solar flares. Some sort of problem with one tiny wire in a controller chip being too thin. Before I came in I'd check a solar flare site and if the sun was having a bad day, sure as shootin' those servers would be having a bad day too. The correlation was too strong to be pure chance.

    Well, they were Sun servers, duh!

  • gtex (unregistered)

    Isn't the WTF the idea that the servers are reacting to a flare that has not yet hit the Earth?

  • Axel (unregistered)

    I received a real spit-take 419 letter yesterday. It offered me 1000 KG of gold and 1000 KG of diamonds for being a loyal subject in my country. Oh, also 4 million US dollars only. In large (!) metal boxes.

    I did a little math, and as of this date, a metric ton of gold is worth over $40 million. That much in diamonds would be worth billions.

    Of course, scammers aren't likely to go after those of us smart enough to do the math, but still...

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