• Tekkaman (unregistered)

    This WTF reminded me of the fact that a lot of people I know (not all of them managers) could be easily replaced by a small Python script.

  • Quicksilver (unregistered)

    The biggest WTF is that the advertisement below the article i for viagra..

    where are we here? in my mailbox?

    you shall be captur-ed by "pirates" spam arrgh

  • Grant D. Noir (unregistered) in reply to gwenhwyfaer
    gwenhwyfaer:
    Eviloverlord:
    Shouldn't that be $HESHEORITDENTS$?
    Not $ARTHURDENT$ ?

    or $DENTARTHURDENT$ . Wait, that one is probably reserved for boxes with support for interstellar networks.

  • Ian (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Token Rings? Don't you mean Tolkien Rings? What has it got in its pockets, my precious?

    In that case, shouldn't it be,"What has it got in it's packetses, precious?"

    Captcha: ewww

  • Ian (unregistered) in reply to Ian
    Ian:

    In that case, shouldn't it be,"What has it got in it's packetses, precious?"

    I should have read them all prior to commenting... not only is it only marginally funny but it's not even original!

  • Martini (unregistered)
    Alex:
    G.R.G. couldn't help but pity the poor guy. And it was out of pity that he wrote a 15-line awk script that would add a new paragraph (that would actually get it right the first time), and pick new unique addresses for the boxes. In fact, while debugging G.R.G. spotted a few duplicate addresses in the existing config file.

    Reminds me of this.

  • (cs) in reply to madchicken
    madchicken:
    God I hate that "joke" about special olympics. I remember a friend who though that picture was hilarious, and sadly few years later he had a boy with downs syndrome.

    It's not a joke, simply the truth. I hope your friend learned the lesson: only laugh at other people's misfortune if you can still laugh when said misfortune happens to you.

    No kids here, ever. :)

  • (cs) in reply to Ian
    Ian:
    I should have read them all prior to commenting... not only is it only marginally funny but it's not even original!
    It happens a lot. Check how many people jumped on the dude who didn't recognize "Brillant!" in My Kind of Copy File. It was original in the sense that you thought of it rather than plagiarized it. And, waddiamean, only marginally funny? Puns and innuendo are the twin peaks of humor.
  • shadow of an elf (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw

    the thing about Tolkien rings is, a REAL demon brings you your mail.

  • dtn (unregistered) in reply to whicker
    whicker:
    jtl:
    Because when a proud man slaves over something, he wants to know his suffering wasn't in vain.

    The script, which not only did he not invent, showed the fact that all his hard work and suffering was a result of his own stupidity.

    It's like someone spending a year manually copying papers by hand, and then being shown the xerox machine down the hall.

    Oh my god, you're right. I never noticed!

    It even does color! Time to put the crayons away I guess.

    That reminds me of that ad (for Staples, I believe) with the "Copy Cat" -- the cat with paint trying to duplicate graphs and what-not. I laughed out loud the first time I saw the ad.

  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to jgreen
    jgreen:
    As an IT manager, it absolutely astounds me how many stories abound where the manager's ego completely impedes forward progress!...

    shrug I did some work as a contractor for a big juice company several years ago where the project manager was recent promoted and this project was his big opportunity.

    Everything went fairly well until I developed a very good working relationship with the Executive VP of Logistics, for whom this project was being made. Whereupon he decided that a few specific rules would now be implemented:

    1. There would be three (3) distinct Oracle servers. Production, QA Test and Development.

    2. I would have read access only to the Development server. Further I would have NO access to the QA Test or the Production servers.

    3. Any and ALL code I wrote, particularly the PL/SQL modules, could only be uploaded by him and only on Wednesdays. If there was a bug in my code I would have to try and fix it blindly and then wait a full week until he uploaded to the Development Oracle server.

    4. The Production server would actually have current data. The QA Test server had data 6+ months out of date because the Project Manager wouldn't allow anyone else to maintain it. The Development server was 2+ years out of date because the PM was the only one he'd allow to update it.

    5. I wasn't allowed to set breakpoints, debug or produce debugging error messages in my code.

    etc etc etc. What a nightmare.

  • Northerner (unregistered) in reply to Edward Royce
    Edward Royce:
    jgreen:
    As an IT manager, it absolutely astounds me how many stories abound where the manager's ego completely impedes forward progress!...

    shrug I did some work as a contractor for a big juice company several years ago where the project manager was recent promoted and this project was his big opportunity.

    ...snippity...

    etc etc etc. What a nightmare.

    That.. sounds impossible. Why the hell do you not give developers access to the development server? How the hell are you supposed to write code when you can't test it? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not a good enough coder to write bug-free code without testing (and I bet a lot of you aren't either.)

    I'd have to say the only sane response to that is to dust off your resume and start looking for the next gig. That situation is the biggest setup for failure that I've ever seen.

  • segmentation fault (unregistered) in reply to Pap

    welcome to the real world. its chock full of WTFs.

  • (cs) in reply to Northerner

    That's the old skool way of doing things. Welcome to 1960. You write on a coding pad, some Pretty Young Thing punches it up on cards, cards get sent to operations, maybe put onto a tape first, then you get your results back in a couple of days. If you're lucky! And we don' need no steenkin' development server! There was just the one giant thing the size of my house in the giant fishbowl room and the air conditioning howling along, helping out the water cooling, flowing uphill both ways! We had to pump it ourselves, too!

    wha? It could have happened...

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to whicker
    whicker:
    jgreen:
    As an IT manager, it absolutely astounds me how many stories abound where the manager's ego completely impedes forward progress! A good manager should be one who would say, presented with this information "Great Job, thanks for the help, this will save me so much time. I just wish we had you working on this earlier!".

    Of course, that would never make it on to this site, other than maybe because it would be so outside the norm, that would be a WTF in an of itself.

    All I ever get for this kind of stuff, is lukewarm sarcasm... "That's still too complicated." Or, "Can you make it even faster?"

    Kind of takes the wind out of my sails, so to speak.

    I used to get that feeling all the time. I'd come up with an automated solution to something that was taking up a lot of someone's time. Since they don't know how hard or easy it was for me to do, they'd naturally default to thinking that what I did was eezy peezy.

    Lesson: You yourself better appreciate your work, because no one else will.

  • Joe (unregistered)

    Hey, where's Top Cod3r?

    He hasn't posted any flame bait yet for this article. He's letting us down.

  • (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Hey, where's Top Cod3r?

    He hasn't posted any flame bait yet for this article. He's letting us down.

    You have a very peculiar notion of what these forums need.

  • Tom Ritchford (unregistered)

    Strangely, I worked with GRG previously, and yes, there was a WTF moment then too!

    I'd hasten to add that GRG is a top engineer, one of the best. However, there was another engineer there who produced a set of faked demos for her work. At a certain point, when it was clear the whole ruse would be exposed, she simply disappeared. (The faking was that she didn't take into account the fact that this was a system with very little memory where everything had to be dynamically loaded from disk...)

    Perhaps he simply gravitates to such companies?!

  • Jack (unregistered)

    $DINSDALE$

  • CodeReaper (unregistered) in reply to dusoft
    dusoft:
    what about $DENTALDOCTOR$ ?

    I prefer $ANALDENTAL$

    Captcha: it's a shortcut!

  • (cs) in reply to Kristopher
    Kristopher:
    Criticizing the writing on this site is like critizing the way a kid with Downe Syndrome talks.

    Who is more retarded? A retarded writer, or a person who makes a point of reading said writer's work, and then complains that it is retarded?

    Trick question. The real retard is the guy who spells "down" with an "e" on the end.

  • Simmo (unregistered) in reply to gwenhwyfaer
    gwenhwyfaer:
    Eviloverlord:
    Shouldn't that be $HESHEORITDENTS$?
    Not $ARTHURDENT$ ?
    $LATE$ $ASIN$ $THELATEDENTARTHURDENT$ It's a sort of threat you see, I never was any good at them myself. But I'm told they can be particularly effective

    captcha: Not Slartibartfast, sadly

  • Simmo (unregistered) in reply to Tekkaman
    Tekkaman:
    This WTF reminded me of the fact that a lot of people I know (not all of them managers) could be easily replaced by a small Python script.

    That one made my day. Thank you tekkaman

  • (cs) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    Joe:
    Hey, where's Top Cod3r?

    He hasn't posted any flame bait yet for this article. He's letting us down.

    You have a very peculiar notion of what these forums need.

    It's simply that if you don't feed the troll, he goes away.

    Of course brow-beating him for being a troll probably helped. ;-)

  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to Northerner
    Northerner:
    That.. sounds impossible. Why the hell do you not give *developers* access to the *development* server? How the hell are you supposed to write code when you can't test it? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not a good enough coder to write bug-free code without testing (and I bet a lot of you aren't either.)

    It was pretty tough. First it was in PL/SQL which isn't the friendliest language around and secondly this back-end code was to support a major what-if logistics & distribution analysis application for how to most efficiently distribute this company's product across the USA and, eventually, Canada & Mexico. Very complex considering it dealt with perishable products transported inter-modal and frozen, refrigerated and non-refrigerated.

    So I had to do my testing and debugging by using the front end GUI. Slow, laborious and the GUI was buggy as heck so it was hard trying to figure out if it was my code or theirs (mostly theirs). Honestly there's something about many VB programmers that I'll never understand. Something in them just drives them to deviate from the established application design and go haring off in different tangents. I did about 8-9 years of VB myself but I didn't do that.

    shrug IMHO it was the Project Manager thinking I was either a rival or someone looking to supplant him. Considering that I was a contractor with no intention of being hired, I liked my freedom in those days, I found this to be a bit weird.

    But hey. It could be worse. I had a Project Manager once who was an undiagnosed manic-depressive. Come late Friday afternoon with a major pony show on Monday I'd hear:

    "No no no! This is all wrong! We have to redo everything!"

    :)

  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to poochner
    poochner:
    ...If you're lucky! And we don' need no steenkin' development server! There was just the one giant thing the size of my house in the giant fishbowl room and the air conditioning howling along, helping out the water cooling, flowing uphill both ways! We had to pump it ourselves, too!

    LUXURY!

    I had to dig my own silicon to make my own CPUs!

    AND I had to use my own bone marrow to make the RAM chips!

    AND I had to walk to work!

    In the snow!

    For 50 miles!

    One way!

    :)

  • Dmitriy (unregistered)

    Its quite simple really, i think i can recap that conversation:

    -Hey chief, I wrote this 15 line awk program to solve all the company's programs... -15 line awk program? Whats that translates to? 2000 lines of assembly code? And thats what... 10,000 bits? Do you think we have 10,000 people to support every bit of that program? NO! You bloody fool, we dont need your kind round here! -Are you worried that the program will remove the need for people who work solely to maintain this purple box problem? -Worried? No! Maybe in your backwards land of... USA we use simplified things like AWK, or Shells, or things like Computers, but down here we use sticks and bones! calls secratary Johnson, get this man out of here! And bring me another brilliant purple idea!

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Edward Royce
    Edward Royce:
    Honestly there's something about many VB programmers that I'll never understand. Something in them just drives them to deviate from the established application design and go haring off in different tangents. I did about 8-9 years of VB myself but I didn't do that.
    Not knowing established design patterns?
  • Edward Royce (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Not knowing established design patterns?

    It's not even that. In most of the cases I experienced where VB programmers would find some new component or read up on a technique that they wanted to include, there already was an established design. The screens, the object structure, the specific list of components allowed. Everything was set in a design document with signatures from various dept heads and VPs.

    So when these guys would go goofing off and changing the design on the fly, the QA test would catch them and flag those impromptu changes as "deviations" and report them to the PM.

    Funny thing was one PM who fired the QA tester for reporting so many deviations.

  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to b0x0rz

    You are now officially a Briton.

  • s (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    What's so hard to understand, it's base 128: integrate over the gaussian curve specified by the above equation, take the inverse root, convert to fractals, increment by 1 each time skipping file-not-found and voila!

    You mean eval() on true, print() on false and increment by 1 skipping on file-not-found?

  • Calinous (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Matthew:
    Token Ring and Ethernet aren't topologies.

    And while Ethernet is now widely believed to imply a star topology, early Ethernet networks used a bus topology with 10BASE2 connectors terminated at both ends with a resistor or circuit. It's not so long ago, actually.

    Modern Token Ring networks use a more or less star-shaped topology just like modern Ethernet neworks.

    Token ring network transferred each packet thru each terminal (in a round fashion). The Ethernet with switches sends a packet from the sender to the receiver, the Token ring packet would navigate thru all the workstations, be received by the destination and be discarded by the sender (which would check the received packet for correctness)

  • seanb (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    (I could use some pointers on where to start studying design patterns, as someone who took the wrong path in CS school)

    (captcha: consulting)

  • Humphery (unregistered) in reply to jgreen
    jgreen:
    As an IT manager, it absolutely astounds me how many stories abound where the manager's ego completely impedes forward progress! A good manager should be one who would say, presented with this information "Great Job, thanks for the help, this will save me so much time. I just wish we had you working on this earlier!".

    Of course, that would never make it on to this site, other than maybe because it would be so outside the norm, that would be a WTF in an of itself.

    Ego? Hmmm... I'm glad you're not my IT manager. Maybe you should be a bit better at what you do?

    I interpreted it as the boss seeing the efficient solution and becoming angry/worried that they could no longer charge for hours & hours of installation/maintenance. Anyone else?

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to poochner
    poochner:
    That's the old skool way of doing things. Welcome to 1960. You write on a coding pad, some Pretty Young Thing punches it up on cards, cards get sent to operations, maybe put onto a tape first, then you get your results back in a couple of days. If you're lucky! And we don' need no steenkin' development server! There was just the one giant thing the size of my house in the giant fishbowl room and the air conditioning howling along, helping out the water cooling, flowing uphill both ways! We had to pump it ourselves, too!

    wha? It could have happened...

    Flowing uphill both ways is really stupid: You should have reversed the flow and put a waterwheel and generator on it to siphon off the energy it gained by falling down the constant gravitational slope so you could save thousands on electricity bills. Seriously though, uphill both ways means that it is expending x internal energy to go from situation A to sit B (1) and then expending y going from B to A (2); suppose the situational energy at A is a and that at B is b. When expressed as equations, they are (1) a + x = b (2) b + y = a (3 = 1 + 2) a + x + y = a From the keyword "uphill", which is applied to both steps, we can infer that x and y are both positive, thus the existence of a cycle of this nature is dependent upon the equality of equation 3 not being a hard equality, or, in other words, the falsity of the first law of thermodynamics.

    PS, here, troll, troll, troll. Foo-oo-ood.

  • Snow_Cat (unregistered) in reply to Al
    whicker:
    It even does color! Time to put the crayons away I guess.
    Al:
    Ahh ... reminds me of one of my many student jobs. I worked for a firm of lawyers and they had obviously decided at some point in time that they needed colour photocopies ... but unfortunately these did not exist (it was only 2002 after all). It was my job to colour in the architectural plans that they made copies of (it kinda spurred me on to do well in my comp sci degree). [...] I worked out they were probably paying about $24000 a year (this is UK money really - so £12000) to get someone to colour in photocopies rather than buying one. Al
    So, how long did it take you to buy a colour-copier yourself?
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