The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2011-09-20 Reply Admin

Man, there's a lot od shithouse economists on this site...

2011-09-20 Reply Admin

Jay:
... I'll cheerfully admit that roads are a relatively difficult thing for private companies to run. There would be issues of how a private organization could acquire long, contiguous stretches of land to build the road without having powers of eminent domain. (But then, it's not so clear that giving the government the power to seize people's property with the government deciding when and where and for how much is a perfect solution, either.) There would be issues of how they could efficiently charge people for use of the road, without having to have a toll booth at the entrance to every parking lot. On the other hand, I bet if the government quit running the roads, someone would figure out how to do it. I recall that when radio was first invented, people said that just obviously this had to be run by the government, because how could you charge people to listen to a radio broadcast when anyone could buy a radio and tune in your station? How would you even know who was listening? But then entrepaneurs came up with a solution: Don't charge people to listen; charge advertisers...

Way back when rail was king, they were actually privately owned. Remember Monopoly? "Take a Ride on the Reading Railroad." That was a railroad owned by someone. They were all linked together and the owners charged for their use. If you bought up a bunch of them in key choke points and jacked up the rates, you'd be a Railroad Tycoon. It worked well enough. When automobiles came into favor, the government assumed ownership and dug up most of the tracks. It's too bad, rail is still the most efficient means to ship over land.

2011-09-20 Reply Admin

Buddy:
Jay:
... I'll cheerfully admit that roads are a relatively difficult thing for private companies to run. There would be issues of how a private organization could acquire long, contiguous stretches of land to build the road without having powers of eminent domain. (But then, it's not so clear that giving the government the power to seize people's property with the government deciding when and where and for how much is a perfect solution, either.) There would be issues of how they could efficiently charge people for use of the road, without having to have a toll booth at the entrance to every parking lot. On the other hand, I bet if the government quit running the roads, someone would figure out how to do it. I recall that when radio was first invented, people said that just obviously this had to be run by the government, because how could you charge people to listen to a radio broadcast when anyone could buy a radio and tune in your station? How would you even know who was listening? But then entrepaneurs came up with a solution: Don't charge people to listen; charge advertisers...

Way back when rail was king, they were actually privately owned. Remember Monopoly? "Take a Ride on the Reading Railroad." That was a railroad owned by someone. They were all linked together and the owners charged for their use. If you bought up a bunch of them in key choke points and jacked up the rates, you'd be a Railroad Tycoon. It worked well enough. When automobiles came into favor, the government assumed ownership and dug up most of the tracks. It's too bad, rail is still the most efficient means to ship over land.

We still use it for shipping over land, extensively. The US freight rail system is huge. What, you think businesses would use a less efficient method for decades just for the hell of it? Pretty much all of the coal in this country is shipped by rail. It doesn't work as well for finished goods, goods that need to go to stores not located near rail tracks, goods where time is a significant factor, etc. etc. Passengers, in particular, generally didn't like it, especially once air travel became a thing. Because passenger rail in the US is basically dead (with a handful of exceptions), you don't notice how much freight rail we still use.

As for the radio thing, way to miss the point entirely. The problem wasn't "we need government to run the radio stations' programming!", the problem was "we need government to decide who gets what frequency, because if I'm broadcasting Indie Radio 103.3 and ClearChannel sets up a white noise transmitter on 103.3 with ten times the wattage, nobody can hear me". And, hey, we do that.

2011-09-20 Reply Admin

Jay:
military 20% veterans benefits 3% social security 21% medicare 15% poverty relief 16% health & education 4% government employee retirement 3% transportation 3% interest on the debt 10%
and them miscellaneous other things to use up the remaining 5%

Personally I'd agree that military spending is too high, but it's not all that big a chunk of the total.

If you dropped military spending by a quarter, that money could be used for something actually useful and having a smaller budget for it would disincetivise starting useless wars. That's quite a chunk.

Also, if you fixed the income distribution and social services, you could do away with poverty relief. It's always cheaper to fix the problem at the source. (Or you could be a total dick and do away with it without fixing anything.)

MarkJ · 2011-09-20 Reply Admin

ac:
TRWTF is all the IT people reply saying how IT is below the cleaning staff. Visibly, IT people don't aim very high.

Especially in the restroom.

2011-09-20 Reply Admin

[quote user="QJo"][quote user="BitDreamer"]

All finance requests ... get channeled through IT ... and so through this single person.

Go away and learn how to parse English.[/quote]

Yeah, go get a new english compiler.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

LANMind:
Man, there's a lot odd shithouse economists on this site...

Can't do any worse than those who espoused investing in derivatives or junk bonds! A lot of people lost a lot of money in those scams.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
When the government ran the railways they were better, less expensive and more efficient than since they privatised them. Universities now are rubbish now they are not paid for by the government. Despite all the propaganda, our National Health Service is extremely good, and I will hospitalise anyone who misrepresents it in order to score stupid political points. The Post Office (the geezers who deliver the mail) used to be an institution to be proud of.

I thought you were an anarchist at heart. If anarchy doesn't exclude compulsory involvement in government institutions, what does it exclude?

I really don't care on principle who's running things so long as they are run effectively and efficiently. Few paradigms manage this.

Matt Westwood:
Ultimately the only arguments I've seen *against* taxation stem from personal selfishness.

The only arguments I've seen against a traditionally moral lifestyle stem from irrational self-indulgence. What reasons are there other than the principle of personal choice, with respect to lifestyle or taxes? I know you'd hate to institute morality.

Speaking more broadly, I find the whole public/private dilemma to be hopeless. Do I trust greedy, selfish businessmen or the greedy, selfish politicians? Do I trust markets driven by ignorant, impulse buyers or bureaucracies staffed by unmotivated, careless drones? Do I trust one influential figure far away who can never care about me or another?

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Captcha: Ideo.

hey, here is an "ideo": Send a memo to the finance guys and tell them that you will handle their request with the same priority than the priority they give to IT.

2011-09-21 Reply Admin

Some damn Yank:
Reminds me of a place I worked where no matter how much they cut the IT budget, the President's PC got fixed immediately. This lead the President to continue to assume that IT's budget could be cut further, as additional cuts did not affect service level.
I left before there was just one remaining IT staffer, dedicated to him full-time.

CAPTCHA: quis. Remember class, there will be a quis on Friday.

Those kind of people sicken me to the core. The ones who expect immediate service like they're a king, whether it has to do with work or not (i.e. "I'm Mr. Smith, CEO of Initrode, and I DEMAND that you stop whatever you're doing immediately to fix my home computer, even though I don't use it at work, because I'm Mr. Smith."), and even more the spineless wimps who do it (i.e. "Right away Mr. Smith! Anything you say, Mr. Smith! Do you need coffee, Mr. Smith? Your shoes shined? Your laundry done?").

This ain't the WWE, and people who act like Vince McMahon's "Mr. McMahon" character in real life deserve to be beaten to a bloody pulp.

CAPTCHA: Jumentum. And He shall strike down upon the evildoers with righteous jumentum and cast them into the pits of Hell to burn for eternity.

2011-09-22 Reply Admin

The really scary part of this site is the comments.

A bunch of people who cannot parse the scenarios given to them and the code presented as examples of WTF laughing at the people who made the original mistake without being able to actually identify the mistake that they should be laughing at.

At some point the Daily WTF got taken over by a bunch of people whose comments create more WTFs than the original scenarios presented.

This seems to be a growing problem in our profession. Too many people incapable of reading or designing good solutions to problems laughing at other people's bad designs without the ability to demonstrate the ability to understand the original problem and design something better.

A serious need for a lot of WTFers to sit down and have a long hard look at themselves. The levels of arrogance demonstrated by, apparently (based on the shoddy analysis in the comments) 3rd rate programmers and thinkers is frightening.

If so many people who consider themselves superior to others have such low levels of demonstrated intellectual capacity then is it any wonder that IT tends to get laughed at by those who may have less technical skills but more balanced cognitive processes? Not everyone in IT is 2 years out of school and young enough to still know everything about everything. Let's stop sending out the message that we are limited intellects capable of only snide comments that show ourselves to be less intelligent than the people we are laughing at. We are doing ourselves no favours here. Let's do better.

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2011-09-23 Reply Admin

duncan:
The really scary part of this site is the comments.
A bunch of people who cannot parse the scenarios given to them and the code presented as examples of WTF laughing at the people who made the original mistake without being able to actually identify the mistake that they should be laughing at.

At some point the Daily WTF got taken over by a bunch of people whose comments create more WTFs than the original scenarios presented.

This seems to be a growing problem in our profession. Too many people incapable of reading or designing good solutions to problems laughing at other people's bad designs without the ability to demonstrate the ability to understand the original problem and design something better.

A serious need for a lot of WTFers to sit down and have a long hard look at themselves. The levels of arrogance demonstrated by, apparently (based on the shoddy analysis in the comments) 3rd rate programmers and thinkers is frightening.

If so many people who consider themselves superior to others have such low levels of demonstrated intellectual capacity then is it any wonder that IT tends to get laughed at by those who may have less technical skills but more balanced cognitive processes? Not everyone in IT is 2 years out of school and young enough to still know everything about everything. Let's stop sending out the message that we are limited intellects capable of only snide comments that show ourselves to be less intelligent than the people we are laughing at. We are doing ourselves no favours here. Let's do better.

YHBT YHL HAND

tgape · 2011-09-25 Reply Admin

Gordy Gecko:
Some damn Yank:
Reminds me of a place I worked where no matter how much they cut the IT budget, the President's PC got fixed immediately. This lead the President to continue to assume that IT's budget could be cut further, as additional cuts did not affect service level.
I left before there was just one remaining IT staffer, dedicated to him full-time.

CAPTCHA: quis. Remember class, there will be a quis on Friday.

Those kind of people sicken me to the core. The ones who expect immediate service like they're a king, whether it has to do with work or not

Reread the post you responded to. The President didn't expect instant service. The guys below him gave it to him, because they thought he did. The President figured, since he was getting instant service, IT didn't have more important things to do, so he was paying them too much.

I suspect this sort of thing actually happens more often to IT departments than any of us would expect.

For what it's worth, in my experience, the people who say they don't respect IT because they're pushovers generally won't respect them any more if IT stands up to them.

tgape · 2011-09-25 Reply Admin

duncan:
If so many people who consider themselves superior to others have such low levels of demonstrated intellectual capacity then is it any wonder that IT tends to get laughed at by those who may have less technical skills but more balanced cognitive processes? Not everyone in IT is 2 years out of school and young enough to still know everything about everything. Let's stop sending out the message that we are limited intellects capable of only snide comments that show ourselves to be less intelligent than the people we are laughing at. We are doing ourselves no favours here. Let's do better.

The idiots who troll this site to be able to have some deluded feeling of self-worth when someone bites on their intentionally stupid comments aren't about to be swayed by your plea.

tgape · 2011-09-25 Reply Admin

Dianne Wegg had enough. She just couldn't take it any more. The damned IT department and their incessant requests for more and more things. She called her personal IT assistant. "I need you to modify the priority sorting of financial requests. There's too many requests coming in for IT; they're gumming up all the works. The HR department can't even manage to hire a new cleaner for their bathrooms."

"Did HR submit that request or did they have the cleaners do it again?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't care. Just make sure that it gets priority over all of these damned IT requests."

"Um, one other thing," said Dianne's assistant hesitantly. "I'm IT. And you have me submit most of your requests for you."

"The priority's by title, right?" asked Dianne.

"Yes."

"Ok, then. Your new title will be 'IT assistant to Dianne Wegg'. Leave that at the current IT priority level, whatever that is."

It didn't take very long under the new system for things to come to a head. Unable to get replacement hard drives or replacement power supplies, the company started having one server failure after another.

When the IT Chief was asked, what led to the mainframe meltdown, he had no idea about the event that turned the downhill roll into freefall. But he knew what started the downhill roll. He didn't say a word. He didn't have to. He pulled the memo from his suit coat pocket, and slid it across the desk to the CEO.

Dianne had never thought to consider when it was the IT requests started coming in so quickly. It never occurred to her that it could have been the policy she had made, requiring that every item IT purchased needed to have a separate P.O. But the IT Chief made sure to keep the memo where she had denied his bulk order of ten spare hard drives and ten spare power supplies. The IT individual PO requirement didn't even last long enough for Dianne Wegg to make it back to her car with her box of personal belongings. But the change she had her IT assistant make to the request sorting priority lasted over two decades before being caught.

2011-09-28 Reply Admin

The key here is 'had a son' not 'was a PHP programmer'. I hope all is well with your son dude.

2011-09-30 Reply Admin

Gordy Gecko:
If people this stupid can run companies and be successful, what could a SMART person do?

They could report the HDD status to their seniors?

The Importance Scale and Dianne Wegg

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