• Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to bd
    bd:
    Clayton never asked to push the button again.
    So, what happened to Clayton?

    He wised up? Impossible, he's a business manager. Got fired? See above. Got his index finger chopped off? We might be on to something...

    Being a business manager he probably got a promotion for it. Right after he palmed the blame off onto a developer.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Ah but
    Ah but:
    Joe:
    Bono:
    TRWTF is this article being on The Daily WTF. So some guy clicks a button more than once? Is that really the best submission you got?
    Seems to be better than the best you can do, Bono. What's the matter, forgot how to submit an article?

    I don't need to be a chicken to know I don't like eggs

    But chickens love eggs. They're unborn chickens, after all.

  • Ditto (unregistered)

    This reminds me of a friend of mine ... not very tech savvy, but very impatient ... he'd routinely click on a button or link or whatever and when nothing happened IMMEDIATELY .. he'd click it again .. and again .. and usually nail that sucker about 20 times in the span of 2 seconds!!! It's was always funny when things crashed, or didn't work properly, or opened multiple windows and he'd complain ... "Why's it so slow?" "Why did it open so many windows!" .. "Uh ... because you clicked it a whole bunch of times ... " sigh

  • tero (unregistered) in reply to Tyler Durden
    Tyler Durden:
    tero:
    Yeah, there probably was a prompt that said "Are you SURE you want to make the filesystem?", but no mention about destroying all the data, or that this is the command that every other OS on the planet calls "format".
    One time I took a firearm, loaded a round, cocked the hammer, put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger. You'll never guess what happened next.
    Even if you didn't disable the safety, that's still dumber than anything I've ever done to my computer!
  • DysgraphicProgrammer (unregistered) in reply to Tyler Durden

    You're missing tero's point. try this:

    One time, I was looking for a tooth brush. I found a a box with cryptic text that said something about cleaning. It had something inside that looked like an electric toothbrush. I put it in my mouth and pushed the button. Turned out it was a funny looking gun...

  • (cs) in reply to RandomUser423699
    RandomUser423699:
    hatterson:
    There is no accepted rule for comparing two undefined quantities.
    Don't know if it is "accepted", but I would expect: #UNDEF #ANY_OPERATOR #ANY_OPERAND = #UNDEF

    And in case your operator of choice isn't usually commutative: #ANY_OPERAND #ANY_OPERATOR #UNDEF = #UNDEF

    Mathematically this is nonsense. Similar to saying infinity + infinity = infinity

  • Ouch! (unregistered) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    Mathematically this is nonsense. Similar to saying infinity + infinity = infinity
    Which may or may not be nonsense. If you're working in a one-point compactification of R or C, infinity + infinity is undefined. In the two-point compactification of R, infinity + infinity = infinity (analogous for -infinity of course, and x/0 = infinity iff x > 0).
  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    Linus Torvalds wrote a terminal emulator so he could get Usenet from home. One day, he mistyped the modem device and "dialed" his hard drive, which blew away his Minix installation. He never looked back.

    (He also promptly implemented permissions in his little terminal emulation OS). And we all know how that little terminal emulator evolved into.

  • CodeMacho (unregistered) in reply to hatterson

    [quote user="hatterson"][quote user="RandomUser423699"] Mathematically this is nonsense. Similar to saying infinity + infinity = infinity [/quote]

    And what you going to get with infinity+infinity? Two infinities?

  • RandomUser423699 (unregistered) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    RandomUser423699:
    hatterson:
    There is no accepted rule for comparing two undefined quantities.
    Don't know if it is "accepted", but I would expect: #UNDEF #ANY_OPERATOR #ANY_OPERAND = #UNDEF

    And in case your operator of choice isn't usually commutative: #ANY_OPERAND #ANY_OPERATOR #UNDEF = #UNDEF

    Mathematically this is nonsense. Similar to saying infinity + infinity = infinity
    Forgive me. I was thinking of comparison in the logical sense, not the mathematical sense. Your results may differ.
  • pez (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    Is that even supposed to do something non-destructive on a unix machine?

  • (cs) in reply to pez
    pez:
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    Is that even supposed to do something non-destructive on a unix machine?

    Sure. It's supposed to display a permission error. Unless you're stupid enough to do that as a member of the root group.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    I wonder how Lyle would have handled it?

    captcha -> abigo : apparently I caught it having a good time.

  • nobody (unregistered) in reply to davee123
    davee123:
    So when you want to send out a mailing with, say, a large PDF attachment, it gets written to the mail server hundreds of times.
    Did you not get the memo ten years ago that only chuckleheads email large attachments like this? Here's a hint for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink
  • (cs) in reply to DysgraphicProgrammer
    DysgraphicProgrammer:
    You're missing tero's point. try this:

    One time, I was looking for a tooth brush. I found a a box with cryptic text that said something about cleaning. It had something inside that looked like an electric toothbrush. I put it in my mouth and pushed the button. Turned out it was a funny looking gun...

    So you're saying mkdosfs is just a funny-looking format command, but with extra minty freshness?

  • (cs) in reply to Rupee
    Rupee:
    "I've got 67 more characters to type and then I'm going to post this nonsense!"

    I don't know which of the following is more pathetic: the fact that I'm impressed that there really are exactly 67 characters after the '67' in Rupee's sentence, or the fact that I actually counted to find out.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    Yes, it's a slow WTF day, but it was still enjoyable.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Ilya Ehrenburg
    Ilya Ehrenburg:
    pez:
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    Is that even supposed to do something non-destructive on a unix machine?

    Sure. It's supposed to display a permission error. Unless you're stupid enough to do that as a member of the root group.

    Then how do you write to /dev/sdb without being root?

  • J (unregistered)

    So, push a button three times, and the effect of the button happens three times, that's hardly surprising. I have however experienced a much more surprising effect from clicking a button multiple times.

    I was working in a team developing a web application. One day I was testing some minor code changes to one flow through the application. I had filled in a form and I clicked the confirmation button and thought nothing happened so I clicked again.

    It wasn't that nothing had happened, but the preproduction environment was running on hardware that was state of the art a decade earlier, and I just needed a bit more patience.

    So, after clicking the second time I waited a bit longer and the flow continued. Good I thought and went to proceed with the next step. Then it occurred to me, that I had filled the form with invalid data, and the data validation should have rejected it, but it had just accepted my input and proceeded.

    I went back to look at the code, and sure enough, it did in fact validate the data. Strange I thought, and tried again. This time around it correctly rejected my incorrect data.

    After a bit more testing I found that it would only accept invalid data if I clicked that button twice.

    It turned out there was a race condition in the presentation layer, where the two requests I caused the server to process in parallel would interfere with each other in a way that caused it to accept any data that had been entered, valid or not.

    It wasn't entirely obvious to me how to fix the race condition, and even as I got a more senior developer to take a look we didn't find an easy fix.

    Then I decided that whoever implemented that check in the presentation layer to begin with was doing it wrong, and I added a check to the business logic.

    Saluto, it was no longer possible to hack the application by double clicking.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    TRWTF is no list of the seven states where certain illegals are not illegal.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    I have pushed the button. Pray I do not push the button any further.

    (Sorry)

    TRWTF is that this is really an uplifting story with a happy ending - "ten times as many people bothered to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message".

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    Anon:
    SilverEyes:
    Zack:
    You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

    Nah, I think you missed the point, or English class or something. An event that happened once has happened 1 more time than never happening. An event that happened 100 times has happened 100 more times than never happening. Neither has happened infinitely more times than any amount of times.

    If you get one spam message and you wanted zero, you got exactly one more spam message than you wanted.

    1 = number of spam messages received 0 = number of spam messages desired

    Now, I would like to calculate the ratio of message received to messages desired, so I will simply divide 1 by... uh oh

  • Friday (unregistered)

    The word for emails you "signed up for" but never read is "bacn".

  • Reow (unregistered)

    Serves them right - the only pity is that it was only 3 times.

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