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Admin
Sure you didn't try and stick it into a modem socket? Telepone jacks are smaller then RJ-45s.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Jeez. Take a look in the mirror.
Admin
Simply explain to the customer that we had a 5X download accelerator installed recently as a free service to our best customers. We could remove it if they liked.
Admin
The best 'solution' would be to include verification of both up- and download: When uploading, have the client upload the data, then download it again, and verify the result. When downloading, have the client download the data, then upload it again, asking the server to verify the data.
The only difference here would be that the server and client may do the comparison at different speeds. If needed, that can be solved by making it glacially slow on both machines, and by having the client tell the server how glacially slow it should be.
Admin
<font size="5">H</font>aving done time, I think it would be more fun to belittle the customer, adopt an arrogant tone, slam the phone down, lose that big account your boss mentioned, change jobs...Oops! Perhaps not.
Admin
Not if they do not know what "asymmetric" means in this case.
For example, ATA and USB is "asymmetric", too (with master-slave relations), but up and download speeds over those links are (possibly neglecting some minute differences in protocol overhead) equal.
Admin
Yeah, well at least he can spell!
Admin
I hope that this is a joke.
Admin
For a while, i thought that those "1Meg" numbers were speeds. aka 8 seconds to down load SOME FILE on a 1 Megabit connection... Then i realized that they were sizes, and I laughed the laugh of a thousand years.
Admin
I can't tell if this is pure genius or pure evil.
Admin
Actually, I think it's a WTF?!
Admin
I find it stupid that people expect people to understand computers the same as they do and the next breath whinge because they are doing new things. They hired you because you are the expert.
I think the problem is that the issue was sent to a programmer not a networking person in the first place.
Admin
Why do you think that? The word "asymmetric" could refer to any of a number of aspects of the technology, and to non-techies it's just a label.
Do you understand why ADSL has faster download speeds than upload speeds? What are the limiting factors? Why can a T1 achieve symmetric speeds? Can you explain the difference between Near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT) and how that applies to bundles of Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) cables at the phone company's central office? The cost advantages of single-pair services over balanced-pair services? When you're dealing with people who don't know the difference between bitrate and baudrate, I don't recommend long discussions on QPSK, QAM, OFDM, and the general physics of communications theory.
To oversimplify the issue for those who may be curious: ADSL is asymmetric because crosstalk in the phone cable bundles is more easily controlled in the direction from the central office to the subscribers, so a richer symbol set (higher bit rate) can be used in that direction while maintaining an acceptable level of service.
Admin
This site should be called 'anti-vb.com' I don't personally write a lot of VB code, but to class every single person who uses VB in the 'Dumb' or Incompetent category is retarded.
Tonnes of applications have been written in VB over the years, usually at a fraction of the cost and time that it would take to write in C++ or other lower level languages. True, since it is a very high-level language it tends to attact people that might not have great skill-sets, but don't knock the language, knock the low skilled people that are trying to hack it.
Admin
I could almost say "this happened, I was there". I worked for an ISP in the early 2000's, you can't imagine how often such things happen. Why ? Tons of customers but few employees, and an outsourced helpdesk ( yes, this has to be a WTF in itself ). Then you have two bad enterprise habits : generalized panic and compulsive delegation. So in most cases the problem isn't really knowledge, but people losing self-confidence, they don't even try thinking, they delegate the most basic problems to the most competent or the most helpful ( and thus the most busy ) person they know. Things get worse if you are too kind or too evil : call them idiots, they'll really think they are idiots => more delegation. Help them without question, they'll keep depending on you.
So yes, jefffurry is right, take some time to share your knowledge, give your co-workers some self-confidence. Otherwise things get worse.
For sure, the story was fun and the customer was certainly an idiot, but nobody wants to poison his own work environment, right ? Oh, unless they want to be another WTF-scapegoat ...
Admin
<FONT face=Tahoma color=#000000>Soooo that's why... I always thought something MUST be going on in the UPload and DOWNload thingy... ;)
Having said that, why not make the App download the file instead of the Client uploading them to make sure both take roughly the same time? Since both are now downloading documents... :)
</FONT>
Admin
I found out the hard way, plugging in USB drives without looking at the back of the computer. Whoever put the LAN next to the USB had a very boring sense of humor.
Admin
Hahahaa
Oh wait, you were serious.
I don't expect people to know what ADSL is by acronym, or what ASCII is, or how CRTs work. I expect them to know that a rectangle goes into a rectangle, and something with 9 pins goes into something with 9 holes. I have no respect for people who can't do even that. They are the ones who need a law to tell them to wear seatbelts in a 1 ton hunk of metal going faster than any human can run and who probably ate the wall candy as a child.
Just as a doctor might not expect me to understand how nerve impulses are transmitted, they sure as hell expect me to know how to go to the bathroom and that showering is a good idea.
Admin
Admin
You have to look on the bright side. Its realy quite rare that a problem ticket from a customer gives you all the information you need to "resolve" the problem :)
Admin
What if the CTO/CIO WAS the idiot who raised it? Or he is on the same level of *brillance* and therefore his employees?
Google "hierarchy of incompetence". ;))
Admin
BASIC is a lang designed to help people learn to code. Turtle Logo is yet another with the same filosophy.
Its a tool, but a baby tool, and not a bad tool. You can hack stuff easy, but will be very limited. And as all baby tools, where designed to avoid self-damage. You are overprotected inside the BASIC world.
If you already learn BASIC. You sould move to a better lang. Maybe Object Pascal, or a Java/Python/Ruby/C# alike lang. (JPRC#)
Yet theres lots of stuff to learn on programming. Patterns, better algorithms, etc. Most stuff you will learn will be big than BASIC, so its better to learn these stuff on a JPRC# lang. Imho.
--Tei
Admin
Did you see the first few posts in this thread? Looks like when the ticket was first posted on The Daily WFT, the spelled-out 'A' read ASYNCHRONOUS not ASYMMETRIC.
Admin
I suppose he wrote a few analysis functions: IsAssymetric(), IsALittleBitAssymetric(), IsPartlyAssymetric(), and IsVeryAssymetric() along the way, just to keep the PHB happy?
Admin
Actually, this anymous guys must have been the client raising this ticket... pfff....
Recently on one of my projects I had the CIO banning postbacks on ASP.NET... So I asked him what he thought we should use instead... and he said AJAX.
We have now rewritten ASP.NET and a custom browser so that no postback occur. Problem is though it has cost over £16M so far and still not close to delivering the end product.
Admin
You miss the memo?
We are upgrading to the next version of Visual Studio.
--Mr Fake Coworker.
Admin
If the upload speed depends on whether or not you are actually timing them, that would be Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. (You know, precious CPU cycles wasted on measuring the performance instead of actually working on the upload...) The red shift is there no matter whether or not you are measuring the upload speed.
Of course, this being IT, it would somehow feel nicer if things depended on "left shift" and "right shift" rather than on "red shift" and "blue shift." Good thing that blue cable goes sideways coming out of the computer (but unfortunately I don't know whether it goes to the left or to the right, knowing that might help identifying the cause of the problem...)
Admin
Ah but no, we are also not allowed to use any software younger than 5 years old. Apparently they don't work according to our CIO.
Admin
Just tested it and this is 100% true.
A portabe has a slight bigger socket that allows a USB device to be plugged in.
(Some guy at Acer thought it was funny to put my RJ-45 and my USB ports almost next to each other.)
Admin
Obviously you alter the sending computer to only send either the 1's or the 0's, whichever is less prevalent. This will actually garauntee greater than 20MB/s download bandwidth!
Admin
You're not thinking far enough outside the box yet.
Think about it. If you were just to send the 1s, then since all 1s are actually the same, you merely need tell the recipient how many 1s there are. Ditto for the 0s.
So to send your 20 MB, all you really need is to send a pair of numbers. This shouldn't take that long, even on a 1200/75 serial modem. But if it does, then just apply the compression method again.
Admin
let's see. college philososphy? drink 'til they're cute is always a viable option.........
Admin
I worked at a college helpdesk, and you would be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) by the number of students who managed to fit the LAN cable into the phone jack in their dorm room.
Admin
I had eggs, bacon and hash browns for breakfast this morning. Oh and by the way I will now say something relevant to the WTF.... VB IS THE DEVIL
Admin
Was typing it in blue meant to make people read it? As it does not work. <o:p></o:p>
Admin
It is contrived, Alex changed it to make it a little more obvious. In the original submission I gave, it didn't say ADSL. In fact, we originally thought they meant "Why does 4 MB take 4 times longer than 1MB". Once we got past the language barrier, and the problem difference was between upload and download of 1MB, we all new it was an asymmetric line. I transferred the bug to the CTO for effect, then not-a-bugged it. Twice it was brought back from the dead as "highest priority". Then we made them run a test against yahoo or google and the lightbulb went off.
Admin
There are very few patterns, algorithms, or other programming concepts that cannot be as easily implemented in VB's lastest version, VB.NET 2.0, as in JPRC#, especially C#. It's more of a language preference more than anything else. However, VB.NET is eaiser for a person with a nontechnical background to learn enough to be extremely dangerous IMHO.
Admin
I suspect this whole problem was caused by Carl not putting the new cover sheets on his TPS reports. Didn't you get that memo?
Admin
Just tell the customer that the Upload wire may be crimped, or might be too narrow a guage fpor the amount of data he is trying to push through it.... It needs to be replaced with a thicker guage wire.
Admin
Who are you talking to? The mirror?
Admin
I am with tster on this one.
WTF?!
Spelling? What has that to do with a guy beeing a low-life?
No, I am not the mirror.
Admin
My Qwest ADSL connection just went to 7M down/1500 K up. For about $55 a month.
Admin
Of course it is, but to call looking up a term in a dictionary research is really devaluing the word "research".
Sincerely,
Gene WirchenkoAdmin
Change that first "is" to "was". BASIC has changed considerably over the years. This is natural, as people tend to use what they are used to. (Why else student discounts for software?)
It is not a baby tool anymore.
Or underprotected outside. For example, in C, an integer overflow results in undefined behaviour. When you are trying to deal with a problem at a high level, not having your back covered at a lower level is silly.
Why move? Why not expand (and engulf the world!)?
I find GW-BASIC to be very useful for some types of quick, one-off code. I do not make the mistake of thinking that that capability necessarily makes it suitable for other problems.
Big, small, whatever. Pick an appropriate tool -- "an", because there can be more than one -- and go for it.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Admin
Then, non-techie ought to learn a bit. I do not know the ins and outs of how a carburetor works, but I do know its basic purpose.
No, and I do not care. I can not make use of the knowledge without getting into it.
Knowing a bit of the what sure helps though. I would never have made the complaint that got this WTF started.
Ah, so there is a technical reason why it came about. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Admin
Well let me let you in on something here (judgemental types that you be), I was called into her office because the main boss had a javascript error with another site that we do not own. She asked me to fix it. I will not even explain that because a true techy that posts on here would know the WTF behind that one. . . . So I am just a complete lowlife for making non-technical people suffer? Hmm guess some of us are just too kind hearted and never had a day of revenge when the situation justified it. tster & me. . . . I can probably assume what kind of jobs your have, or at least the ones you don't have.
Admin
« Mine is bigger than yours ! »
My Free (Free the French provider, not free of charge) ADSL connection is 24 M down / 1200 k up. For about 30 euros a month. It's only because I'm in a city though, in my parent's town it's only 8 M down / 800 k up.
Admin
Hmm... that was supposed to be in answer to