• yazow (unregistered) in reply to Gsquared
    Gsquared:

    Please don't confuse american politicians and fake doctors/random celebrities for the general run of the US population.  Despite the images portraid in the media, most Americans are actually reasonable, reasonably educated, friendly people.  It's just very popular in the modern media to portray us as rabid wackos with IQs lower than our shoe sizes and the educational standards of a squirrel hooked on heroin.  This is true of European and American media.  Remember, politicians, modern reporters, celebrities and fake doctors are all in the entertainment business.

    I don't know about. I live in Canada, and by the numbers Canada and the US have similar education levels. The majority of Canadians are idiots, seriously, I have no shame in admitting that, as most of north america is populated with idiots. Although I really doubt that europe is much better off.

    When I was younger I thought otherwise, but then I worked in retail for a while (yikes) and did some business type work (double yikes) and all I kept running into was idiots. Even university is often filled with idiots (sad but true). Why do you think there are so many WTF's? It's because the industry is filled with idiots. I swear the death of the human race will involve drowning in a sea of stupidity.

     
    If you want to see some really scary stupidity check out some political usenet groups. No one can form a logical arguement, they all just claim to be correct in their opinions with nothing to back them up. The same people end up choosing who runs your country and they generally just follow the loudest idiot.

     

    Mmm captcha is: pizza
     

  • mewhoelse (unregistered) in reply to Noam Samuel
    Noam Samuel:

    Reading your message made me check if /bin/true (as opposed to bash's true command, which is built in) has a version argument, and lo and behold what I found:

     

    true (GNU coreutils) 5.96

     

    Yes, that's right, there have been more than 5 versions of /bin/true. I'd like to see their CVS commit comments.

    They were probably changing copyright notices around or something like that...

    BTW, it's version 6.4 on my machine. Also, since ls reports the exact same version, I'm assuming it's the version of the GNU coreutils package, not the individual program.

  • (cs) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:

    Reading this story gave me chills.
    I was on a similar trip (in the Netherlands), meeting with a very, very large French company for a similar presentation.

    In my case the product existed.  However, I arrived from the US on Monday, Sept. 10, 2001.

    I was also on a business trip that week, though fortunately I was on the right continent when the planes stopped flying, albeit 1250 miles from home.

    But two of my coworkers on that trip had flown over from the UK.  They eventually got a flight back only a few days later than their originally scheduled return trip, but for a while there they were wondering just how long it'd be before they could get home.

  • (cs)

    A 20% bonus plus one week extra vacation plus a business trip to the Netherlands? Yeah... I think I'd be willing to construct an alternate reality for all that. I'd need ask for that in writing, of course, since I obviously wouldn't be able to trust my company after that....

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to darin

    darin:

    I think there's an entire economy based upon people selling things that don't exist to people who aren't quite ready to use them.  I also think everyone knows that everyone else is lying, but they've had all idealism beaten out of them so they just put up with it.

     Sure - it's called "the insurance sector"...
     

  • Math (unregistered)

    Hey!  pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha is known here as "version 0+1i".

     Fridays...  :-D
     

  • rp (unregistered) in reply to Dave (not that one)

    Mmm ... but it doesn't conform to standard conventions, with its odd 'args' name for the second argument, and the space in front after the **.

    No, I prefer the source code to Solaris /bin/true, which I, unfortunately, can only legally quote here by omitting the comment with the copyright notice:

    (Or can I?)

  • anymoose (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous coward

    LOL. Well said. the project is off to a bad start already.

  • alex (unregistered) in reply to James

    id pay 9 bucks a ticket to see any sequel to office space..

    fun read though ( :

  • William (unregistered) in reply to ManBunny

    Necessity is the mother of all invention. I know several businessmen and business that operate this way. Way take a gamble on devoting money to something that won't ever make you a dime? Why not hype the product to see if anyon is interested? Once you get enought interest, then you can actual start to make it, confident that you will have buyers for it. Yeah, it seems absurd, but actually works.

  • ludwig (unregistered) in reply to mbvlist

    mbvlist said... 

     

    <q>@above: Yes, there are 'coffeeshops' in Amsterdam, selling weed. But it's not common practice as every American seems to think. You know, Pulp fiction is just what the name says, fiction. </q>

     

    This was certainly not the case when I went to Amsterdam. Granted, it was 10 years ago, but I collected about a hundred business cards from 'coffeeshops' in two evenings just strolling around downtown. Got a mighty contact buzz from it all, and everything I owned smelled like pot. I was also solicited by drugdealers about 15-20 times an hour (Yes many of these guys are just selling crappy/fake drugs to tourists, but they were still guys openly advertising themselves as drug peddlers). On my third day as I was leaving town, I finally found a coffee shop that didn't sell drugs. They had some killer pies tho'

  • No one (unregistered)

    This sounds exactly like the company I work for.

  • G (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Depends on the industry.... gov't contractors snap up PhDs as fast as they can find them - each one gets them a stupid contract bonus from the gov't that more then makes up for paying them to sit on their arse counting pencils or some other inane task. Extra productivity from such people is just a really spiffy bonus.

     captcha: batman (where's robin? and why aren't they cleaning out congress??)
     

  • Jim (unregistered)

    I worked at a company that spent about 2.5 years developing some great Case Management Software for the legal industry.  We then proceeded to sell the software to several different native American Indian tribes.  They cut us checks then decided they didn't really want to show up for training on how to use the software, and in several instances didn't even bother to work with us to install it.  The conclusion I came to is that we should have just been selling complete vapor ware the entire time.  It would have saved us 2.5 years of development and salaries, and the clients would not have known the difference.  The realization made me kind of sad...

  • A. Noony Mouse (unregistered)

    That sounds a lot like the PKM/EKM place where I used to work.

  • Graham (unregistered)

    If I remember correctly the Excalibur bar had different types in display cabinets above the bar. Horrible habit.

  • Anonymous P.M.Doubleday (unregistered)

    Yes, I know, this has nothing to do with the original WTF.  I've been in the business twenty years; been there, seen that ... AND I'M STILL WAITING FOR THE GODDAMN TEE-SHIRT.

    Oops.

     My other computer has Linux on it (and probably the tee-shirt, too).

    Are you really telling me that there is a command called "true"? What is it for?

    What does it mean, semantically (at least in terms of shell scripting)? Wherefore is the philosophical underpinning of its existence and activity? Or in other words, which WTF decided that this was part of "coreutils"? Please tell me that it's a hangover from Sys V and not BSD4.x ...

    And why does true return 0? Oh Lord, I've just tried this on mingw32 (sorry) and yes, it does.

     #if (defined TRUE) && (TRUE == 1)

    #define TRUE FALSE

    #endif

     Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.  I need wisdom; from the Tao of Computing:

    Rather than a beep

        Or a rude error message,<br />

    These words:  &#39;File not found.&#39; </p><p>Too late; my brain has already exploded.&nbsp;</p>
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to spec

    Note to salespeople.

     Sell as much vaporware as you can, collect the bonuses, and then move on to another company!

  • Hellio (unregistered) in reply to Erick

    Oh yes. Specially in the consulting business.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous P.M.Doubleday

    Yes, there is a command /bin/true. It does nothing, successfully. There is also /bin/false, which does nothing, unsuccessfully. Why would you want it? Well, for starters, how about an infinite loop in shell script?

    while true; do whatever; done

    That uses the /bin/true binary. As for why it returns 0: normally, a command returns 0 for success, and nonzero for failure - there are a lot more nonzero values than zero values, so it makes sense to return 0 for "yes it worked", while allowing different nonzero values to mean failure for different reasons. Hence, 0 is true and nonzero is false in shell scripting.

    Anonymous:

    Yes, I know, this has nothing to do with the original WTF.  I've been in the business twenty years; been there, seen that ... AND I'M STILL WAITING FOR THE GODDAMN TEE-SHIRT.

    Oops.

     My other computer has Linux on it (and probably the tee-shirt, too).

    Are you really telling me that there is a command called "true"? What is it for?

    What does it mean, semantically (at least in terms of shell scripting)? Wherefore is the philosophical underpinning of its existence and activity? Or in other words, which WTF decided that this was part of "coreutils"? Please tell me that it's a hangover from Sys V and not BSD4.x ...

    And why does true return 0? Oh Lord, I've just tried this on mingw32 (sorry) and yes, it does.

     #if (defined TRUE) && (TRUE == 1)

    #define TRUE FALSE

    #endif

     Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.  I need wisdom; from the Tao of Computing:

    Rather than a beep

        Or a rude error message,<br />

    These words:  &#39;File not found.&#39; </p>

    Too late; my brain has already exploded. 

  • llarensj (unregistered)

    Anybody remember the selling of Microsoft DOS to IBM? That was a leading case of vaporware. In fact it showld be named Microsoft QDOS, and maked the rise of Microsoft and the fall of CPM.

  • Cameron (unregistered) in reply to mbvlist

    RE: 'Coffeeshops'.

     Last time I was in Amsterdam, It was EXACTLY as most people think. Infact, it wasn't just limited to 'weed'/Marijuana... because ANY drug of choice was easily available and priced surprisingly cheap!

  • (cs) in reply to ManBunny

    Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

     

    now that you mention it...yes.

  • Dark (unregistered) in reply to noname
    Anonymous:

    As a dutch person I am highly offended by this statement. I have allready called several friends and we are scheduling a meeting to discuss the possibility of setting up a committee to study this statement and come with recomendations for setting up a workgroup to formulate a plan to hire a profesional to select a training program so that we can send someone to learn how to properly reply to this insult. When we've done that we just have hire someone to send to this program, for which will set up a committee....

    My friend Zellski once told me this... 

    "The Netherlands don't really exist. It's a meta-country, filled with meta-people, who make observations about other people's observations, comment on other people's comments, and discuss the various ways one can discuss."  

    That was in 1994, though. These days, that describes most of the net :)

     

  • ajk (unregistered)

    A company in Germany I worked for did almost the same, we went to the factory to install the system telling the customer it would be a weekend installation and that the customer could count on being up and running by Monday and instead spent the next 6 weeks at site programming what was missing. Wasn't fun cause we went there with clothes for 2-3 days. The project finished about 1 year later. The customer wasn't pleased.

     

  • PHP Coder (unregistered)

    thats why our R&D office avoids telling sales and marketing anything until products have passed the verification labs...

  • (cs) in reply to darin
    darin:

    I think there's an entire economy based upon people selling things that don't exist to people who aren't quite ready to use them.  I also think everyone knows that everyone else is lying, but they've had all idealism beaten out of them so they just put up with it.

    I was in Germany for a couple of weeks, and while I was there my company figured I should head over and meet with a vice president at Deutsche Bank.  Now a VP at a bank is not a high level executive, they're more like middle managers or directors (my boss once told me his son got a job as a branch manager for a bank, which I thought was pretty good until he told me that the branch was the ATM inside the local grocery store).

    So this vice president starts lashing into me and the sales guy.  His voice is quite loud and he's telling me how lousy our product line is and that it doesn't do what the sales people promised, and that he's getting no where with service, and so forth.  As he continues I start taking notes.  He asks what I'm doing, and I say I'm writing it down so that I can fix this when I get home.  He seems surprised, and says "you can get this stuff fixed?"  I say of course, I'm the developer of package A, and I talk to the developers of B, C, and D every day.  "Wow" he says, "I thought you were another salesman."  He then proceeds in a calm manner to tell me specific details of where he was having problems, with a smile on his face.  Turns out he didn't really hate the software so much as he hated the relationship with the company and the brick wall trying to get things fixed.  I was the first developer or service member that he had actually talked to, and none of his complaints had even made it into our bug database.

    This isn't surprising.  My company has built a very successful enterprise software business on this kind of service.  We frequently turn around patches in a few hours, which really sets us apart from BEA and IBM.  In the end, the words "I'll get it fixed" combined with a commitment to do just that from every person in the company and a reputation for having done that in the past is worth a tremendous amount in the software industry.
     

  • Ben (unregistered)

    "I suppose it's a good thing that he has no plans to run for any sort of government office."

    You make it sound like you have to be honest to hold government office...
     

  • Tom Rethard (unregistered)

    Yep, Knowlege Essentials lacked some essential knowledge: of ethics.

    There was a semilar case in the DFW Metroplex in the 70s: a very well known software firm bid - and won - the contract to develop a new mainframe accounting system for a bank (a very large bank). Two months before the delivery date, they decided to get started, but were barely able to get the beta documentation written in time. The salesman was told the delivery of the new mainframe had been delayed for 6-9 months, so he simply delivered a blank tape. 8 months later, when the mainframe was installed and the tape mounted for the install, amazingly enough, it had a permanent tape error. Of course, no one was surprised by a permanent tape error since tapes were so unreliable (kinda depends on whether you knew what you were doing or not - storing them in a very dry, very hot or very wet area could be problematic). Naturally, the salesman was very shocked to hear there were problems and personally delivered a "fresh copy" of the tape that very afternoon - the result of several months of late nights.....

     Yes, a lot of business is done that way. All you have to be incompetent, lazy and/or dishonest, and you can still make a fortune.

    Of course, there are exceptions. A few years ago I was involved with a company that successfully sued a software "consulting" company for similar shennanigans: lots of shill code that looked like it was working as long as you didn't deviate from the script. Cost the bad guys about $5 mill.

  • (cs) in reply to ptomblin
    ptomblin:

    mrsticks1982:
    So what neat gizmo did dave buy with the 20% bonus and where did he go on that extra week of vacation?

    1. Hash
    2. Amsterdam's red light district


    Both at an extremely good value for money, if I might add from my 1 day experience.

  • Araneidae (unregistered)
    http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/coreutils/src/true.c?rev=1.25&root=coreutils&view=auto

    That is grotesque.  At first I thought the code was a parody.

     Here's the corresponding BSD version (non-code stuff elided):

    static char copyright[] =
    "@(#) Copyright (c) 1988, 1993\n\
            The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.\n";
    static char sccsid[] = "@(#)true.c      8.1 (Berkeley) 6/9/93";

    main()
    {
            exit(0);
    }

  • tbrown (unregistered) in reply to Dear Lord
    Dear Lord:
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    In terms of code, Knowledge Essentials could be summed up like this: int main(int argc, char ** args) { return 0; }
    You got me.  I was expecting a big, whopping WTF after seeing the above example!  Whew!  Everyone knows that first curly brace belongs with it's mates on the very first line (and not take up a whole entire line on it's own).Congrats to Dave.  :-)captcha = hotdog (indeed)

    No, no, no, no, no... You have to take full advantage of any opportunity to increase your SLOC count (assuming you work for a project management organization that insists on accumulating utterly meaningless development metrics).

    Should be:

    int main
(
   int argc,
   char** args
)
{
   return 0;
}

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