The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2010-09-25 Reply Admin

Larry:
TRWTF is operating systems that require rebooting.

Just out of curiosity: You seem to have a problem with a five-minutes planned downtime. How would you handle a several-hours unplanned downtime?

2010-09-25 Reply Admin

PeriSoft:
And even that's not as good as the abbreviated truncated receipt my grocery store prints for Land O' Lakes Spreadable Butter - it comes through as "SPREAD BUTT". I'm not sure if it was an automated system with a bad result, or someone being snarky, but it's always fun to be checking out and have the big info display say, "SPREAD BUTT" to everyone in line behind you.

My local QFC prints it as "LOL BUTT". Makes me laugh every time.

frits · 2010-09-25 Reply Admin

Morten:
frits:
I'm not a number, I'm a free man!

Hey frits, what's your IP?

HTTP.

tiller · 2010-09-26 Reply Admin

Windows does reboot itself if you have automatic update set to on.

ClaudeSuck.de · 2010-09-26 Reply Admin

Silfax:
The system is FILE_NOT_FOUND

Would you rather expect it to be True?

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

WWIII Historian:
WWII Historian:
Comment On OUCH!:
FWIW, "The system is rebooted" is an artifact of translation from Korean by a person unfamiliar with English grammar.
Korean makes no distinction between the present and future tense, so 'the system is rebooted' and 'the system will be rebooted' are both in the non-past tense.
That must have made Douglas McArthur's famous statement extremely confusing to them.
Scratching head wondering what all those Koreans were doing in the Philippines in 1942.

Though now checking Wikipedia he said it in Australia, not the Philippines, and Wikipedia is never wrong. For long.

But he said it ABOUT the Phillipines. Of course he wasn't IN the Phillipines when he said it. How would it make any sense to say "I shall return" when you are already there?

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Oh you mean Windows. Once I had spent more than 24 hours rendering an animation. It was almost done when I got this nice popup "Rebooting in 5 minutes, screw you loser..." and no way to stop it.
What's cute was the popup was even recorded into my movie!

I hate Windows. And that is only one of about ten thousand reasons.

I know you MS lovers think Unix people are stuck up elitist snobs who walk around with our noses in the air smug in the knowledge that our system is better. But did you ever consider... we know your system very well. It is impossible to avoid. But you don't know our system very well. If you did, you'd join the smug snobs too.

So why weren't you rendering an animation on your Unix system instead of a Windows system, you smug snob? If Unix is as good as you believe, then the animation rendering software available for Unix must be just as good.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Huzzah!:
Not defending Unix/Linux here but these days, in many cases, this is a problem originating with the vendors (i.e., not providing drivers or an API). Prime example: NetGear doesn't support *nix OS's in any fashion, to the point that they say the equivalent of "go bug some *nix experts to write a driver for you". If vendors provided better support (either end-user level or *nix developer level), there'd be less of these issues.

Lets assume that the ratio of Windows systems needing drivers compared to Unix systems needing drivers is 100:1. So, if it takes $100,000 to develop a driver, for 10,000 Windows systems it costs $10 per Windows system and it costs $1,000 per Unix system. For most companies, is not cost effective to develop Unix drivers.

alegr · 2010-09-27 Reply Admin

MarkJ:
anon:
Ralph:
Oh you mean Windows. Once I had spent more than 24 hours rendering an animation. It was almost done when I got this nice popup "Rebooting in 5 minutes, screw you loser..." and no way to stop it.
You realize that this is, if not initiated by your helpful network admin, a big red warning sign. Usually, this tells you that a really important component of the OS just up and died (winlogon is the usual suspect). It doesn't do that on it's own. This is a sign of a malware infection or flaky hardware. Windows had nothing to do with it, and a shutdown was, in fact the only sensible way to go.
Another WTF is rendering programs or other time-consuming processes that don't checkpoint themselves!

And if a rendering program uses screen capture to build frames (that's why the reboot dialog got into the movie), it's doing it completely WRONG.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Jay:
WWIII Historian:
WWII Historian:
Comment On OUCH!:
FWIW, "The system is rebooted" is an artifact of translation from Korean by a person unfamiliar with English grammar.
Korean makes no distinction between the present and future tense, so 'the system is rebooted' and 'the system will be rebooted' are both in the non-past tense.
That must have made Douglas McArthur's famous statement extremely confusing to them.
Scratching head wondering what all those Koreans were doing in the Philippines in 1942.

Though now checking Wikipedia he said it in Australia, not the Philippines, and Wikipedia is never wrong. For long.

But he said it ABOUT the Phillipines. Of course he wasn't IN the Phillipines when he said it. How would it make any sense to say "I shall return" when you are already there?

One can say "I shall return" when waving goodbye, so had he thought of it, he could have said it as he fled the Philippines. But that's irrelevant to the comment about Korean language aspect: It just shifts my question to, What were all those Koreans doing in Australia in 1942? In other words, I think WWII Historian's comments are quite wide of the mark, and either he is a troll or he is badly confused.

2010-09-28 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Ken B.:
Dontcha love those programs with "click OK to reboot", with no option to manually reboot later...
Oh you mean Windows. Once I had spent more than 24 hours rendering an animation. It was almost done when I got this nice popup "Rebooting in 5 minutes, screw you loser..." and no way to stop it.
What's cute was the popup was even recorded into my movie!

So is this a troll or are you really that dumb? What the hell, I'm going to bite. Ralph, the only WTF here is you. For one thing, if a popup displayed on your desktop gets rendered into your movie then you are clearly using a woefully flawed renderer - I'm guessing some free thing you downloaded from some kid's personal website, or maybe something you wrote yourself? The simple fact of the matter is that no decent renderer will be writing screen grabs to file, which is exactly what would need to happen to bake a popup into your movie. I've never encountered a renderer of any sort that used such a primitive technique, even in the freeware world. This is just so retarded I'm hard pushed to believe that such a thing even exists.

Second, if your computer warned you it was going to reboot itself then that can only be because of an automatic update install (if it were a hard crash it would blue-screen and reboot immediately, not in five minutes time). I'm 99% sure you can dismiss this and tell Windows not to reboot but that's not even the point here - the point is that you shouldn't have auto-update enabled if you are using your workstation as a rendering machine. Only the highest level or moron would have their machine configured to download data and install it in the background whilst running a long and expensive render.

You've made it very obvious that you have no idea how to configure a Windows box for a given purpose. You're basically saying "Windows is shit because I don't like the default options and I don't know how to change them". Tech support folks refer to this as "user error" but in your case I think "user ignorance" is far more appropriate.

2010-09-28 Reply Admin

Ralph:
C:
If you *REALLY* wanted the cancel capability, an End Process would do the job. ;-)
If you *REALLY* knew your favorite OS as well as those of us who hate it do*, you'd know that when you go to the task manager and kill the process, another one just spawns to take its place, and the countdown timer doesn't even reset.

If you *REALLY* knew anything at all about the O/S you hate so much you'd know that you can disable the "Automatic Updates" service in the Service Manager snap-in to prevent the process from restarting when you kill it (and it doesn't take a genius to see that this is a deliberate and necessary feature to ensure that auto-updates don't stop if the process crashes).

But then, if you REALLY knew anything at all about any of this stuff you would simply disable automatic updates in the first place. Remember, you are the moron who lost 24 hours of work because you didn't know how to turn off automatic updates (FYI: it's right there in the control panel and it's actually called "Automatic Updates" - what kind of gibbering simpleton can't figure that out?).

Hang on a second... nobody could be this ignorant yet still claim to know it all, surely? Damn it, I'm posting in a troll thread aren't I? OK, that's quite enough of that then.

2010-09-28 Reply Admin

plaga:
Lets assume that the ratio of Windows systems needing drivers compared to Unix systems needing drivers is 100:1. So, if it takes $100,000 to develop a driver, for 10,000 Windows systems it costs $10 per Windows system and it costs $1,000 per Unix system. For most companies, is not cost effective to develop Unix drivers.

I fully understand the economics of this, I'm just pointing out the problem isn't specifically because "*nix is hard to use".

Kuba · 2010-09-30 Reply Admin

Ralph:
Once I had spent more than 24 hours rendering an animation. It was almost done when I got this nice popup "Rebooting in 5 minutes, screw you loser..." and no way to stop it.
What's cute was the popup was even recorded into my movie!

I'll feed the troll: you're silly and superstitious. I don't know what the rendering software was doing wrong, but apparently it was screen-scraping. That's WTF #1. Said software would also not allow to resume an interrupted render -- WTF #2. Then you obviously think that there's no way to kill processes on Windows. WTF #3.

2010-10-03 Reply Admin

suscipere:
So why weren't you rendering an animation on your Unix system instead of a Windows system, you smug snob? If Unix is as good as you believe, then the animation rendering software available for Unix must be just as good.

And it is. Guess what was used to render Avatar?

frits · 2010-10-03 Reply Admin

next_ghost:
suscipere:
So why weren't you rendering an animation on your Unix system instead of a Windows system, you smug snob? If Unix is as good as you believe, then the animation rendering software available for Unix must be just as good.

And it is. Guess what was used to render Avatar?

You mean Aliens, right?

2011-01-12 Reply Admin

What is even more painful is reading the pluralization of computer with an apostrophe and an s. Knock that shit off.

OUCH!

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