• first (unregistered)

    actually what the hell, is the author having a stroke? Bruce are you OK?

  • (cs)

    So the real WTF is that dreams aren't real?

  • Balu (unregistered)

    Sorry, I didn't develop any interest for the story. Could you please elaborate a bit more on the Kaley Cuoco part?

  • Pippo (unregistered)

    Why not getting rid of the idiotic bar in the frist place?

  • (cs)

    This is an example of the kind of anonymization/embellishment that we DON'T need on the site.

  • _ (unregistered)

    Kaley who?

  • dull (unregistered)

    That was the worst WTF i have seen in ages.

    A boring story about a run of the mill error - then made to try and be interesting by adding a dream......

  • Mike (unregistered)

    trwtf is wave files!

    If you have to use them (why?), at least call them wav files

    captcha: ludus, short for ludicrous

  • My name is irrelevant (unregistered)

    A long time ago, we had a UNIX machine in our lab.

    The backup process ran every day and everyone was used to the fact that it took several hours to finish.

    Then we discovered the small bug in the backup command:

    dd bs=10 if=.....

    After fixing this SMALL bug, it finished in a few minutes...

  • Ash (unregistered)

    The real WTF is just about to happen. That notification email he just got tells him that for some reason its combining the wrong files, since the procedure to do so worked on audio size, and would seek out the appropriate files based on that, within a set of directories spanning mutliple locations. Now it just cobbles together any old crap as long as the chunk nos match.

    A bit like my coding really :/

  • lesle (unregistered)

    Sorry, Eric, she's dating Superman now.

    http://wonderwall.msn.com/movies/henry-cavil-kaley-cuoco-dating-1759105.story?ocid=answw11

  • Mr E (unregistered)

    "...and then I woke up and it was just a dream. The End."

  • J.R. (unregistered)

    A dream sequence? This ain't Dallas FFS

  • (cs)

    While the dream part may be a storytelling WTF in itself, TRWTF is publishing a patch on week-ends.

  • B (unregistered)

    TRWTF is WAV files. It's a phone company recording (presumably) telephone voice prompts or autodialer recordings. 128Kbps MP3 would be overkill and there are speech codecs for VoIP that would reduce these files to trivial sizes.

  • Anonymous Paranoiac (unregistered) in reply to B
    B:
    TRWTF is WAV files. It's a phone company recording (presumably) telephone voice prompts or autodialer recordings. 128Kbps MP3 would be overkill and there are speech codecs for VoIP that would reduce these files to trivial sizes.

    Yeah, 20MB file sizes for voice prompts in a phone system is absurd. Not only is 128kb overkill, anything over 8bit 8k mono is pointless.

  • ANON (unregistered)

    So TRWTF is that they put code into production without ever testing it?

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Does Eric work for the NSA?

  • fgfg (unregistered)

    Should we start a petition to bring back MFD, as it would improve the overall quality of the site?

  • Paul (unregistered)

    I've once done something like that as well. Back in the days when Delphi 5 and dBase IV-files where still considered 'ok' (ish) we had some function that needed to loop on all records in a table.

    So, progressbar.min=0; progresbar.max=table.count(); and then happily crunch your way through the data and increment the progress bar on every row. (oh, and call Application.ProcessMessages() because, of course, all work was done in the GUI-thread...)

    Turns out table.count() used a cursor to iterate over all rows and took ages, while the actual work took lightly less than half a second.

  • drake (unregistered) in reply to first

    Most phone companies use GSM audio compression - why wav files? Sure storage is cheap nowadays, but this is a terrible idea...

    Oh, and the real WTF is Big Bang Theory - that show is awful and horrendous(Kaley is hot though, I'll give you that).

    Captcha: baratus. B.A. Baratus, also known as Mr. C, hates flying...

  • Saribro (unregistered) in reply to Pippo
    Pippo:
    Why not getting rid of the idiotic bar in the frist place?
    Quite. One of our demo samples for our SDK on Linux had a progress bar while waiting for the connection to a device. The progress bar was usually reporting nonsense, if it didn't hang, or got stuck on screen permanently, or .... The progress bar was skillfully removed from the sample; Not a single customer ever mentioned the change.
  • neminem (unregistered)

    Yep, that was pretty dumb. I don't mind the anonymization most of the time (other than when it's code where half of it has been rewritten into another language and the other half hasn't, leading to an awesome noncompiling language chimera, those are always fun.) But this is a great example of what not to do: start off with a hook that sounds like it's going to be a great story, and then reveal it was a dream, completely irrelevent, and that the actual story is going to be extremely boring. Which it was. I already forgot what it was about.

    (Also by the way, it's Comic-Con, not Comicon.)

  • (cs) in reply to dull
    dull:
    That was the worst WTF i have seen in ages.

    A boring story about a run of the mill error - then made to try and be interesting by adding a dream......

    Goal is to determine how many segments to process.

    Existing algorithm opens headers of already segmented audio, determines the total size, then divides by segment size to determine how many segments are to be processed.

    Existing algorithm doesn't realize, it already knows how many segments there are.

    WTF?

  • (cs) in reply to xaade 
    int DetermineNumberOfUnits(List<int> amountPerUnit, double averagePerUnit)
{
   // The number of datum in the list could be wrong.
   // return amountPerUnit.Count;

   // use math instead.
   int total = 0;
   foreach(int value in amountPerUnit)
   {
      total += value;
   }
   return Math.Round(value / averagePerUnit);
}
  • Sethur (unregistered)

    Please keep your private celebrity fetishes out of articles you publish for public consumption because that's incredibly creepy, thanks in advance.

    Captcha: caecus - please don't tell me about your caecus fetish, either.

  • eVil (unregistered)

    And then they all fell down a well, right?

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Sethur
    Sethur:
    Please keep your private celebrity fetishes out of articles you publish for public consumption because that's incredibly creepy, thanks in advance.

    Captcha: caecus - please don't tell me about your caecus fetish, either.

    Seconded. This isn't a fanfic site.

  • WTF did i just read? (unregistered)

    WTF did i just read?

  • Andrew (unregistered)
    Barenaked Ladiea

    Which is, of course, the Italian counterparts of BNL.

  • Kempeth (unregistered) in reply to _
    _:
    Kaley who?
    Cute blonde actress starring in a show which is far worse in its writing than anything the Daily WTF has ever seen. Also you're supposed to start with "knock knock".
  • (cs)

    For the love of Bruce almighty, they're WAV files, not "wave" files.

  • Mr. Principal (unregistered)

    Mr. Johnson, what you've just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent story were you even close to anything that could be considered "The Real WTF". Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

  • Wishing Editors Edited (unregistered)

    Editors: please go take englinsh classes, again. You clearly failed the first time.

    "and it was only a dream" - 3rd grade cop out to telling a good story. Why bother putting it in this article? It doesn't add anything...

    "An emergency, thought Eric? Yeah, sure. Then why wasn't it an emergency yesterday evening." - stupid Eric (or editor). Something can be not-an-emergency because there is still time to deal with it yesterday. Or because the degree of badness is not yet understood. Or a million other reasons. Then, today, when badness is better understood, and there is no time to fix before damage happens, yes it is an emergency.

    "However, thanks to a change in the export process" - use of however is distracting and unnecessary. Should not have been inserted.

    "The import was split into three steps. First it loads..." - get your tenses straight. "was split" = past. "loads" = present. be consistent. probably 6th grade stuff, at the latest.

    "while the real work took only four, Eric went further into the code" - consider using words like "delved" instead of "went". Words that provide a more descriptive, more visceral description of the activity, rather than a very bland, passive "went."

    "What he saw was that the time" poor construction and passive, again. "He discovered..." or "He read..." or "He was shocked to see..."

    "rather than measuring the file size, it was measuring the audio size. Which required it to open" - you have not explained the difference between file size and audio size. Why should any reader know what this is? Also, don't start sentences with "which." You're not good enough writers to experiment with poetic license yet. Practice getting the basics solid before you try to do advanced stuff.

    "Given the criticalness of the accuracy of the progress bar" - again, why would accuracy be critical? This has not been identified - or if it has, it's so long ago in a poorly written story that it's forgotten. Also, try "Given the critical customer requirement that the progress bar be accurate..." or "Given the criticality that the progress bar be accurate...". And remember: you're writing for a geek site. Accuracy and correctness are different things. The progress bar was probably sufficiently accurate to a percentage point, but provided incorrect status, unrepresentative of the actual state.

    You never told the reader what the problem was. Was it that the space was running out because the size checking mechanism wasn't working? Was it that there was plenty of space but the server failed to allow uploads? Was it that performance degraded to an unacceptable level? Was it that the president couldn't receive an audio update about the status of his daughter? Why did Eric's change actually matter?

    The real WTF: thedailywtf.com

  • n_slash_a (unregistered) in reply to _
    _:
    Kaley who?
    Kaley Cuoco, the lead actress in The Big Bang Theory, which is an extremely funny show that all of my nerdy and non-nerdy friends love. She was also in the last season of Charmed.
  • (cs)

    Progress bars were invented by a project management team.

  • (cs) in reply to n_slash_a
    n_slash_a:
    _:
    Kaley who?
    Kaley Cuoco, the lead actress in The Big Bang Theory, which is an extremely funny show that all of my nerdy and non-nerdy friends love. She was also in the last season of Charmed.

    And the Rav4 Genie.

  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to neminem
    neminem:
    (Also by the way, it's Comic-Con, not Comicon.)
    Actually, it's "Com-Icon", to distinguish it from "Exe-Icon".
  • katastrofa (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that this actress is terribly ugly. Nothing to have wet dreams about.

  • (cs) in reply to Kempeth
    Kempeth:
    _:
    Kaley who?
    Cute blonde actress starring in a show which is far worse in its writing than anything the Daily WTF has ever seen. Also you're supposed to start with "knock knock".
    No, it isn't "knock knock" it is: 
    for (i = 0; i < 3; i++
    {
    for (j = 0; j < 3; j++)
        sound ("knock ");
    say ("Penny ");
    }

    Look, get it right!

  • Manditory (unregistered)

    1 - wave? 2 - someone one call who doesn't leave a PC running? 3 - fanfiction?

  • erat (unregistered) in reply to Manditory
    Manditory:
    1 - wave? 2 - someone one call who doesn't leave a PC running? 3 - fanfiction?

    4 ??? 5 PROFIT!!

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous Paranoiac
    Anonymous Paranoiac:
    B:
    TRWTF is WAV files. It's a phone company recording (presumably) telephone voice prompts or autodialer recordings. 128Kbps MP3 would be overkill and there are speech codecs for VoIP that would reduce these files to trivial sizes.

    Yeah, 20MB file sizes for voice prompts in a phone system is absurd. Not only is 128kb overkill, anything over 8bit 8k mono is pointless.

    Hey, I run all my phone calls through my 7.1 surround system with the Bluetooth connection on my cell.

  • Tasty (unregistered) in reply to Wishing Editors Edited
    Wishing Editors Edited:
    Editors: please go take englinsh classes, again. You clearly failed the first time.

    "and it was only a dream" - 3rd grade cop out to telling a good story. Why bother putting it in this article? It doesn't add anything...

    "An emergency, thought Eric? Yeah, sure. Then why wasn't it an emergency yesterday evening." - stupid Eric (or editor). Something can be not-an-emergency because there is still time to deal with it yesterday. Or because the degree of badness is not yet understood. Or a million other reasons. Then, today, when badness is better understood, and there is no time to fix before damage happens, yes it is an emergency.

    "However, thanks to a change in the export process" - use of however is distracting and unnecessary. Should not have been inserted.

    "The import was split into three steps. First it loads..." - get your tenses straight. "was split" = past. "loads" = present. be consistent. probably 6th grade stuff, at the latest.

    "while the real work took only four, Eric went further into the code" - consider using words like "delved" instead of "went". Words that provide a more descriptive, more visceral description of the activity, rather than a very bland, passive "went."

    "What he saw was that the time" poor construction and passive, again. "He discovered..." or "He read..." or "He was shocked to see..."

    "rather than measuring the file size, it was measuring the audio size. Which required it to open" - you have not explained the difference between file size and audio size. Why should any reader know what this is? Also, don't start sentences with "which." You're not good enough writers to experiment with poetic license yet. Practice getting the basics solid before you try to do advanced stuff.

    "Given the criticalness of the accuracy of the progress bar" - again, why would accuracy be critical? This has not been identified - or if it has, it's so long ago in a poorly written story that it's forgotten. Also, try "Given the critical customer requirement that the progress bar be accurate..." or "Given the criticality that the progress bar be accurate...". And remember: you're writing for a geek site. Accuracy and correctness are different things. The progress bar was probably sufficiently accurate to a percentage point, but provided incorrect status, unrepresentative of the actual state.

    You never told the reader what the problem was. Was it that the space was running out because the size checking mechanism wasn't working? Was it that there was plenty of space but the server failed to allow uploads? Was it that performance degraded to an unacceptable level? Was it that the president couldn't receive an audio update about the status of his daughter? Why did Eric's change actually matter?

    Before you teach English, you should look up these three words: sarcasm, embellishment, & allusion. They will answer all your invalid points.

  • Stuart (unregistered)

    Is no-one going to mention the spelling errors?

  • Manditory (unregistered) in reply to n_slash_a

    Funny? WTF?

  • asdf (unregistered) in reply to Manditory

    glad to see I wasn't the only one who thought the dream was lame. I have never seen Big Bang, but I remember the first time I saw her was on 8 simple rules, she was only reason I watched the show (hey come on now, I was a teenager living with my parents, I would take anything to see some hot girls especially if my parents didn't disapprove)

  • Joel Leclerc (unregistered)

    The WTF itself was WTF... you know, meta-WTF-ness. Like with the dream and all, and that Kaley Cuoco thing. Oh yeah, and with grammar errors throughout the WTF made it even more WTF.

    So basically, can I just ask: Why did you want a meta-WTF?

  • (cs) in reply to _
    _:
    Kaley who?

    Exactly. And it is a fairly NSFW lookup on Google. Thanks a ton TDWTF, my employer's going to ask why I ran that search at work.

  • (cs)

    Could have done without The Kaley Cuoco Misdirection, but there's something to be said about a front page story that ends with dog slobber.

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