• (cs)

    I sure hope I never have to prostate myself.

  • (cs) in reply to belzebub
    belzebub:
    Do you know what is the difference between "Lovecraftian" style of writing and this article's style? No? Me neither, because after 5 paragraphs of empty phrases and meaningles sentences, I gave up.

    So what you're saying is, I succeeded. Thanks for reading.

  • (cs) in reply to Naliba
    Naliba:
    I sure hope I never have to prostate myself.

    I was going to fix the typo, but I like your comment better.

  • DJUrsus (unregistered)

    resource -> resources

    kin -> ken

    prostate -> prostrate

    what on -> what went on

  • Living requires no will. (unregistered) in reply to Lorne Kates
    Lorne Kates:
    Anonymous Coward:
    Yeah - well, I've lost the will to live by the end of part 2.

    And yet, unfortunately, you still managed to finish your rant before dying.

    If you lose the will to live, you don't immediately die... since your body still has reserves of nutrition to keep itself ticking along.

    You will EVENTUALLY die... because presumably it's the will to live which drives the food procurement process, amongst other things.

  • Steve (unregistered)

    Hit the Halloween candy a little early today, didn't we?

  • On Beyond Zebra! (unregistered)

    Oh, come on...everyone knows a true Lovecraftian horror needs to use the words "squamous" and "non-Euclidean" at least once.

  • (cs) in reply to Living requires no will.
    Living requires no will.:
    If you lose the will to live, you don't immediately die... since your body still has reserves of nutrition to keep itself ticking along.

    You will EVENTUALLY die... because presumably it's the will to live which drives the food procurement process, amongst other things.

    That makes sense. AC is running on the rules of "Kairo/Pulse" rather than "The Happening".

  • (cs) in reply to On Beyond Zebra!
    On Beyond Zebra!:
    Oh, come on...everyone knows a true Lovecraftian horror needs to use the words "squamous" and "non-Euclidean" at least once.
    Eldrich horror! The words that i could not find in the whole article are Eldrich horror!
  • Anomalous Crowbar (unregistered)

    I liked it. Out of a whole bunch of stories lately that have tried to puff up a completely mundane event by imitating or referencing well-known books, this one actually succeeded in making it fun to read. The content wasn't the story, it was the style it was written in. I thought it was a great way to do the Halloween thing.

    The one metaphor that fell flat for me was the wrongness going down to the kernel, since I immediately thought that no, it only went down as far as a couple of misplaced files in the file system and a bit of line noise, and had nothing to do with the kernel at all. Ah well.

  • (cs) in reply to On Beyond Zebra!
    On Beyond Zebra!:
    Oh, come on...everyone knows a true Lovecraftian horror needs to use the words "squamous" and "non-Euclidean" at least once.

    Turn the article 90 degrees anti-inwards, and a unicorn will appear with those words.

  • (cs)

    tl;dr

    champagne hangover

  • (cs)

    This is similar to "gee there is this nice new partition that is quite large, why not use it", only to realize that it is the descriptor for the entire volume (before partitioning).

    Of course, then one looks at the root directory, and observes: There is this file "vmunix" there and it doesn't seem to be used. It takes a bunch of space, so I'll delete it.". This is fine and dandy until the eventual reboot, where the system falls flat on its face.

    Note to self: Always keep the "Live CD/DVD" close at hand. Nice to have in such emergencies.

    Note to others: We have removed 'sudo'. Deal with it.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    On Beyond Zebra!:
    Oh, come on...everyone knows a true Lovecraftian horror needs to use the words "squamous" and "non-Euclidean" at least once.
    Eldrich horror! The words that i could not find in the whole article are Eldrich horror!
    I think they appear once you click on the cornify link. Obligatory hidden text.
  • donger (unregistered)

    Yep she's a beaut all right!

    [image]
  • Anomaly (unregistered)

    TRWTF IS all the comments from the author. They never get this involved in the discussion. Except for snoofles ego stroking.

    Someone on the first page of comments complained about the verbose text. Have you ever read Lovecraft?

  • Nevermore (unregistered)

    The name of the server: mockingbird.

  • Jeff Grigg (unregistered)

    Real story: At another company, a naive new developer decided to "clean" the windows directory on his box by renaming it, and then moving back any files he needed. The first step worked.

    ;->

    (We just reinstalled Windows to fix it. There are more subtle ways to recover, but it just wasn't worth it. ;-)

  • Sigivald (unregistered) in reply to Merus

    Yeah, "I was an idiot and AIX is kinda weird" isn't much of a WTF.

  • ANON (unregistered) in reply to Trotsky
    Trotsky:
    I love the Metallica reference in the title....great stuff Alex!

    I completely agree!

  • erat (unregistered) in reply to a Reader
    a Reader:
    The unreadable comments were a bit of an improvement actually - the comments have definitely gone further downhill than the content.
    QFT
  • roadrunner (unregistered)

    OK, it's been 30 years since I last used this, but ... There is a way to edit your directory listing in a vi-type editor, thus allowing you to delete a file even if its name includes unprintable characters that you can't type, see, or even know what they are.

    so if you have foo bar %&!something-weird as files, then %some-command-I've-long-since-forgotten opens vi with

    foo bar %&!something-weird

    Go to the 3rd line, type dd, then :wq (That's "delete line", followed by "write quit", for non-users of vi.) Voila! Problem fixed.

    A quick Google didn't turn up the command for me - does anybody else remember this?

    (Not that this would help with a server full of such files - it just reminded of this.)

    CAPTCHA: vulputate - very foxy, indeed.

  • Captain Oblivious (unregistered)

    Too long. Didn't read.

    Happy, Akismet?

  • Zylon (unregistered)

    At this point, it seems fairly obvious that The Daily WTF has become little more than an exercise in trolling its own readers.

  • (cs)

    Well, I've seen some pretty awful articles here, but this was the first I just literally could not stand to read. (and not because of the "spooky" theme either. That's actually an improvement, except on the comments page.) Glad we have decent writers like "ratchet freak" here to summarize.

  • pouzzler (unregistered)

    Get a real browser if yours doesn't allow to replace stupid CSS with black text on white background.

  • fan (unregistered) in reply to Zog
    Zog:
    Ahhh AIX, my old friend, we meet again on this Hallowed Night...I've brought our other companions, SunOS, RS/6000 and Ultrix, HP/UX...together before us all, they shall bow

    All Unix variants except RS/6000 which was the name of one generation of the hardware platform that AIX ran on.

    AIX is still alive and well running on pSeries. Perhaps the biggest servers by some measures.

  • (cs) in reply to Anomaly
    Anomaly:
    Lorne Kates:
    no laughing matter:
    So now the CSS of the comment page is fixed, but we lost all the comments posted before that operation?

    Nothing's been removed.

    What the hell are you freebasing? Is it ground up M&Ms? I think it is. Stop chasing the Mars, man. Open your eyes instead of closing them. Man.

    FTFY M&M's are Mars not Hershey also you spelled hershey wrong originally.

    And I don't think the point of today's WTF was the WTF at all. I think the point was a horror story in lovecraftian style. Tell me you didn't shutter at the mention of IBM Support.

    Points out a spelling error. Makes a spelling error.

  • (cs) in reply to lolwtf
    lolwtf:
    Well, I've seen some pretty awful articles here, but this was the first I just literally could not stand to read. (and not because of the "spooky" theme either. That's actually an improvement, except on the comments page.) Glad we have decent writers like "ratchet freak" here to summarize.

    Here's a suggestion, you fuckers. If you don't like the article, include a link to your own cunty shit and prove how much pissing better you can do. If you havent' got the fucking brains of a shit to be able to do that, fuck off and die in a fucking bonfire, you bunch of pricks.

  • (cs) in reply to Jeff Grigg
    Jeff Grigg:
    Real story: At another company, a naive new developer decided to "clean" the windows directory on his box by renaming it, and then moving back any files he needed. The first step worked.

    ;->

    (We just reinstalled Windows to fix it. There are more subtle ways to recover, but it just wasn't worth it. ;-)

    A naive (old) developer sitting in my office chair once decided to clean up an elderly laptop by deleting all those Windows updates files. All very well, till when he next switched on the machine and got a couple of hundred updates. Lost a day's work over that.

  • Herp (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood

    This guy's going HAM over here.

  • Zylon (unregistered) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    Here's a suggestion, you fuckers. If you don't like the article, include a link to your own cunty shit and prove how much pissing better you can do.
    Your suggestion sucks. Here's a better one-- when they post crap articles, we all complain about them until they get the message that literally nobody wants this to be a fanfic site.
  • Kyle Huff (unregistered)

    Nicely done. Bravo.

  • Kyle Huff (unregistered) in reply to belzebub

    That was the most Lovecraftian part of the whole thing.

  • Bernd (unregistered)

    The story is rather stupid. If they had a working cp, why not simply copy everything from the temporary directory back? Then the system should have probably been fine without any IBM support.

  • verisimilidude (unregistered)

    Great writing. You have pulled out the feeling of Poe and Lovecraft and applied it in a classic way to a WTF story. I loved it.

  • Toby (unregistered) in reply to Guest
    Guest:
    Aonymous:
    TRWTF is the author was a singer at Initech: "during my tenor at Initech" should be "during my tenure at Initech".

    Not to mention, you should EXORCISE a devil, not get it in shape :)

    I thunk they said they were going to tax it....

  • tywertjhs (unregistered) in reply to QJo
    QJo:
    Pavv:
    Seriously? This is crap. That guy^^ just summarized a 4000 word article in 25 words - and nothing was lost. Can anyone recommend a site that's like what DailyWTF used to be (ie not crap)?

    This man reads War and Peace and remarks: "Seriously? Napoleon tried to invade Russia and failed. End of story. Why embellish it with pointless wittering about all these worthless people? I bet their all maid-up."

    Indeed. And he's right.

  • str (unregistered) in reply to arh
    arh:
    I read the comments and got really interested in this "LoveCraft", wondered if it was MineCraft for adults or something. Then, sadly, I realized it had to be some kind of writing style.

    Couldn't finish the article though, too much nonsense and drama. Which sucks, because it seemed like a great deal of effort had been put into it.

    Yeah, I don't know what Lovecraft is either. I actually thought the article was a very poor attempt at mimicking Edgar Alan Poe....

  • Mitch (unregistered)

    Amazing. I keep seeing people saying that they're sick of this site and they're leaving, yet this article seems to have more comments than I';ve seen for a long time....

    I guess it's like althoughs people who got so pissed at FB's security settings they left....

    (FWIW: I haven't liked the articles here for a while now either. Just sayin' )

  • Kostiantyn Gurianov (unregistered)

    I never knew Stephen King was an IT technician.

  • (cs) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    lolwtf:
    Well, I've seen some pretty awful articles here, but this was the first I just literally could not stand to read. (and not because of the "spooky" theme either. That's actually an improvement, except on the comments page.) Glad we have decent writers like "ratchet freak" here to summarize.

    Here's a suggestion, you fuckers. If you don't like the article, include a link to your own cunty shit and prove how much pissing better you can do. If you havent' got the fucking brains of a shit to be able to do that, fuck off and die in a fucking bonfire, you bunch of pricks.

    u mad bro?

  • sdfn (unregistered) in reply to Anomalous Crowbar
    Anomalous Crowbar:
    I liked it. Out of a whole bunch of stories lately that have tried to puff up a completely mundane event by imitating or referencing well-known books, this one actually succeeded in making it fun to read. The content wasn't the story, it was the style it was written in. I thought it was a great way to do the Halloween thing.

    The one metaphor that fell flat for me was the wrongness going down to the kernel, since I immediately thought that no, it only went down as far as a couple of misplaced files in the file system and a bit of line noise, and had nothing to do with the kernel at all. Ah well.

    you're a knob jockey. The articles here are meant to be about the fuckup, not about creating an entertaining 5 part mini-series. Someone else summarised (perhaps too succinctly) that basically someone inadvertently moved /bin (or part thereof) and that perhaps the length of the article was a bit excessive given the story boiled down to what happened and how it got fixed.

    Also, TRWTF is IBM.

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to Kostiantyn Gurianov
    Kostiantyn Gurianov:
    I never knew Stephen King was an IT technician.
    I know a Stephen King that works for IBM....
  • shmosel (unregistered) in reply to Cthulhu
    Cthulhu:
    This is just a rewritten dupe from http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/It_Must_Have_Been_Using_Those_Files.aspx

    TRWTF is that both articles have exactly 144 comments, making this comment #145, and thus TRRWTF.

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to sdfn
    sdfn:
    Anomalous Crowbar:
    I liked it. Out of a whole bunch of stories lately that have tried to puff up a completely mundane event by imitating or referencing well-known books, this one actually succeeded in making it fun to read. The content wasn't the story, it was the style it was written in. I thought it was a great way to do the Halloween thing.

    The one metaphor that fell flat for me was the wrongness going down to the kernel, since I immediately thought that no, it only went down as far as a couple of misplaced files in the file system and a bit of line noise, and had nothing to do with the kernel at all. Ah well.

    you're a knob jockey. The articles here are meant to be about the fuckup, not about creating an entertaining 5 part mini-series.

    Glad we got that sorted out. It's always nice to be told what to do by somebody bossy, humourless and dull. And it's best when that person has absolutely no actual authority to make such pronouncements -- the feeling of fulfilment you get when obeying someone else's arbitrary orders based on that person't limited intellect is transcendent.

    Now, can you tell me which hand I use to clean myself with, and the nature of the fabrics in which I am to clothe myself? What is the penalty for failing to follow your pointless little rules and neglecting to adhere to your nasty fascistic little belief set?

  • (cs)

    Why can't you just mount the affected HDD in a different server /PC, copy everything back with a correctly running shell and then but it back into the server? Or use a live-cd?

  • Russell (unregistered)

    The Halloween theme was a good idea, but it makes my eyes hurt to much; I was never one for the dark background (other than in terminal).

  • jarfil (unregistered)

    /tmp/bin/mv /tmp/bin /

    Wait, what have I just done?

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Hehe, good fun, definitely captured the spirit of Halloween :)

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