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Admin
They are the ones that complain a lot.
Admin
I'm sorry, but what does the "MS" stand for in your post? No wonder you got docked for the overuse of acronyms!
Admin
My big CSV WTF is that developers use it because it's an easy way to export data to Excel. But end users don't understand the difference between a CSV and an XLS. They double-click the icon with the X on it and up pops Excel with their data. So then you get requests for different formatting, fonts, and whatnot, and they don't want to hear that you can't do them because "I just click the big B and it makes it bold. Why can't your program do that?".
Admin
Triso: What does your sig mean?
Admin
The horror... the horror....
Admin
A good friend of mine was with me at a Fuddrucker's hamburger place. He said, seriously, "I think I had better order a half-pound burger. I don't think I am hungry enough to eat a one-third-pound burger today".
I miss him.
Admin
Wrong: PC disk drives don't generally re-write the magnetic domains on the hard drive when they read them. They only re-write them when they write them.
What references do you have for your statement?
Admin
Similarly, I once got a call for help from some amateur writing a BASIC program (this was back around 1980 when computers came with BASIC).
The statement causing the problem was
Admin
Similarly, I once got a call for help from some amateur writing a BASIC program (this was back around 1980 when computers came with BASIC).
The statement causing the problem was
Admin
Similarly, I once got a call for help from some amateur writing a BASIC program (this was back around 1980 when computers came with BASIC).
The statement causing the problem was
DIM A [5, 2000, 10, 5000]
I'm a programmer, not a support person, so I'm not always good at explaining things. I never did get him to understand why his program would not run on any computer that was available at the time.
Admin
Having a name that ends in three f's is way cool!
Admin
"Before" you get to all that wet stuff? If you're an island, aren't you SURROUNDED by wet stuff? You have to "get to" the wet stuff before you get to your island, regardless of what direction you're coming from. Or going. I think.
Admin
I know this "network admin" which gave the following commands to a server:
[user@very_important_server user]$ su
[root@very_important_server root]# ifconfig eth0 down
... (no response, since he was disconnected) ...
'ifconfig ethX down', under Linux, disables the X-th network card (most systems have eth0 and eth1, that is, for 1st and 2nd network card).
Would be OK if he was at the console, but he was accessing the server via SSH (remote access) from home, the server was 30km away from him, and it was a Sunday night (with users coming to work on a Monday morning).
In the words of Zippy: YOW!
Admin
So, you were working on a Unix system with hundreds of users, and the sysadmin hadn't set resource limits?
Your code wasn't the real WTF here. It's easy to accidentally write runaway code; that's why the OS provides facilities to prevent it from becoming an inadvertent denial of service. Developers should be careful, but it's the sysadmin's job to limit the damage they can do.
Admin
Why are there three versions of my reply on the board? WTF? How come it doesn't happen to the rest of you?
Admin
It would take too much effort for me to remember the actual code line for line, but a previous programmer at my company once wrote a block of code to pull a resultset from the database, loop through the result set and put all the values into an array (ok so far) then pull another result set from the same table on similar but different criteria, loop through and pull that result set into a matching array, then manually merge and sort the arrays in a bunch of loops.
Admin
WTF? The manager wasn't supposed to be annoyed? If the keyboards aren't your property, you have no right to do that.
Admin
10 years ago my boss (who is actually a programming god, this was just a post-lunch brain fart we all have from time to time, but he gave me a front row seat for it)...
Boss: Seth come in here look at this. Its driving me nuts for a half an hour!
Seth: Whats up?
Boss: Look! Perl keeps telling me that .5 is greater then zero! (to be honest, for a second it looked weird to me too the way he showed it to me!)
Seth: Um, .5 *is* greater then zero, just not by very much.
erupting laughter and red face....
Admin
<blah>Isn't the UK (and Ireland) a part of the American Capitalist empire?</blah>
Does the UK use ASCII as well?
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
Admin
That's the real WTF there.
According to Wikipedia:
Admin
No, the "Anglocentric" (English) part does not. However much we'd like to believe we're not in Europe.
Rich
Admin
How bout: Don't worry about all of the paint you're using. The bit buckets get refilled every night from the Sherman Williams server.
Admin
*fires up about:config* Is this obliquely referring to dom:popup_maximum?
Admin
Well, first you get to some of the wet stuff, then on the other side you get to the rest of the wet stuff. So the only way to get to all the wet stuff ( all = some + rest ) is to cross the island. Or something like that.
Admin
Carts are good for detecting Joes. Run a new hire's PL/SQL or equivalent through ExplainPlan... >3 carts -> bye bye ;)
Admin
Were you looking for a C/C++ programmer? If so, she shouldn't have even been considered since she is only familiar with C/C++, but her example demonstrates that she was indeed "familiar" with it. Granted, everything she wrote is wrong, but then I would probably write the equivalent if I were asked to write similar functions in any of the numerous other languages with which I am only "familiar" (perl, vb, assembly, ...).
Admin
I think what the original was trying to get across is that by reading the data on the drive, it reinforces the magnetic integrity.
Admin
But if the wife agrees--then this guy's a hero!!!
--Jim
Admin
Those are perfectly reasonable questions if the person asking doesn't know Java; after all, there are plenty of case-insensitive programming languages (COBOL, Pascal, etc), and there are plenty of languages where function calls and/or method invocations don't use parentheses to delimit the list of parameters (COBOL, the ML family, etc).
If Java knowledge was required for the class, though, then yes, that's pretty bad.
The case-sensitivity question reminded me of a minor college WTF story: one compiler-design class I took was based on a group project, a Modula-2 compiler. Somehow I got appointed as a sort of unofficial team leader, and one of my first acts was to impose source control. (This was the late 1980s, and we were working on Unix machines, so I just threw RCS on, archived the code, and showed everyone how to check in and out.)
And not a moment too soon: the next day, one team member checked in a hundred or so changes he'd made so that the compiler would be case-insensitive, because he found case-sensitivity annoying.
The Modula-2 specification mandates case-sensitivity.
That day, the team got to see the real value of source control: rolling back the WTFs.
Admin
Yes, damn her for expecting you to actually look at and, perhaps, attempt to fix the problem. How dare these users expect their tech support people to do more than say "scandisk-defrag-reboot"...
Expecting you to make some attempt to fix it is perfectly reasonable. If you're any good at your job you should have at least attempted some basic testing or checking with her over the phone. For extra brownie points you could have tried to fix the remote access problem, perhaps by restarting a service (nice and easy with a remotely scheduled batch file with net start/stop), then trying again.
And you wonder why people have such a low opinion of IT departments? It's because the first "tech" staff they come across have an attitude like that.
</pet hate>
Admin
I did that once, on a LTSP, but with a more smart command:
[root@very_important_server root]# ifconfig eth0 down;something;ifconfig eth0 up
This way the conexion go down, ....whatever, then go up. And no one notice :D, well.. the LTSP will not notice :D
Admin
I think you're possibly missing the point and ruining the elitist vibe of TDWTF we all enjoy when bringing others down - including whether or not the vic is a noob or not. Or is this your way of bringing us all down (good job, I like it).
Admin
LOL:
Admin
This doesn't have quite the WTF-nature of some of these fine anecdotes, but it's my own personal favorite Wacky Consultant story.
I was working for a small start-up in the early 1990s, and we'd hired a couple of consultants who turned out to be in over their heads. One washed out quickly. The other hung in for a while, then resigned because, he said, he'd just been diagnosed with a terminal illness and didn't have long to live.
We found a replacement, who eventually came on full time. Years later, we were reminiscing, and it turned out that the replacement knew this "terminal" consultant - who was happily working for another firm in the area.
Apparently claiming to be on the brink of death was just his tactful way of backing out of the job.
Admin
I dimly recall a certain mainframe designer who used 1's-complement arithmetic in many (all?) of his system designs (and a 6-bit byte length with 60 bit words, among other things).
One day a vendor who manufactured systems designed by this guy decided to enter the new (at the time) competitive C marketplace. They developed a C compiler for their systems, with some...interesting properties.
The problem was basically this: there are two zero values in one's complement arithmetic. If you ask the machine (in assembler) whether a value is equal to zero, these two distinct bit patterns would both return true. The "greater than zero" and "less than zero" operators would also behave as you might expect--they spent an extra cycle or something to get the right result. The more confusing quirk was that for equality there was one operator that would compare numerically (so +0 == -0) and another that compared bitwise (so +0 != -0).
Now how the heck do you do this stuff in C? If you say "OK, we'll use numeric comparison for all the integer comparisons", then you get things like "~0 == 0" and you also screw up all those clever algorithms that try to manipulate bits using a combination of arithmetic and bitwise logical operators.
To make life more interesting, they used the bitwise-equality operator for pointer comparisons and the numeric-equality operator for integer comparisons. I don't remember exactly what that caused problems with, but problems it did cause...
Admin
When I was just getting into unix, I was playing around with C code, not knowing what I was doing. Well, I came across this code (on a webpage or newsgroup, I don't remember):
while (true) {
fork();
}
"Hmmm.... I wonder what this does", I said to myself. "Let's try it out." On the school's unix server. Which is also the file server. And it's late spring, so final papers and dissertations are being saved on this machine.
Made perfect sense to me. Until I ran it and the terminal stopped responding. And the sysadmin had to be called in from home. I think the server ended up being rebooted.
Ware the fork().
Admin
I am currently consulting for a financial firm. The in-house developers a trying OOp in PHP. To get a few rows of data, they do this:
Admin
The worst thing about CSV is that often someone screws up the implementation in ways that can't be fixed. I have seen advisories like "do not use the doublequote (") or comma (,) character in any field when entering billing data" because either of these characters in a field will stop the billing reports application dead. Waving USD$50K in front of the vendor (a.k.a. our estimated internal costs, above licensing costs, to switch to a different applcation) is not enough to make them fix the application either. We spent the $50K anyway, but not on those bozos.
Tab-delimited fields are prone to similar problems as CSV; however, very few people actually use tabs in field data because the "Tab" key in most applications selects a different field. It's a much better choice of record separator than comma just because all the corner cases arise so much less often.
Admin
But when questioned, she flat-out stated something that was way off track. Either she thought she knew it (and was egregiously wrong), or she knew she was on shaky ground (in which case she should have said something like "is this right?" or "I'd have to look at an example real quick").
If someone says "I'd have to look at an example real quick", I say you should let them. You should be able to tell pretty quickly whether they're usefully familiar (haven't memorized it, but can go find an example and then go "oh yeah, there it is" and proceed to adapt it correctly) or not (go find something and then either stare blankly at it, or attempt to adapt it in an utterly wrong fashion).
Admin
Was there a particular reason you went out of your way to point out the guy's ethnicity?
Admin
The UK is not part of Europe (according to the Brits...:)
Admin
"How do i compile this file you sent me?"
"Compile it in visual studio."
"But i dont know what type of file it is its not a cpp file."
"Its a .C file... its C code.."
"Ohh... uhhh.. ok"
"..."
Senior C developer... ftw?
Admin
My favorite contractor code was one SQL statement buried in the middle of a large stored procedure:
select body from email_queue
The statement must have been placed there for debug purposes. No where clause. Eventually the table grew large enough that this select statement brought a production database to a standstill.
The same contractor also was setting an integer value to 1, 2 or 3, then passing that value to a stored procedure that used a boolean parameter.
Admin
Never heard of the chunnel I see.
Admin
Of course she did. The question was purposefully misleading, and would have been caught by somebody with experience in c/c++, not just passing familiarity.
Admin
Uhh, because being an Alaskan native was a job requirement? And what's ethnic about it? They wanted someone who lived in Alaska, presumably because their office is in Alaska. If a company here wanted an Alberta native, I'd be eligible despite my pasty white ass and tendency to speak Italian when aroused.
Of course, I'm just assuming here. I notice that "Native" is capitalized, so it's possible their company might have some policies in place regarding the hiring of minorities (like Inuit, for example). In any case, it's obvious the guy was *not* the best choice for the job, as noted by the use of the word "forced".
Admin
Hey stuff happens. My wife set up my first date with my girlfriend. (In truth, by that time we had already planned to divorce and were not above helping each other out)
Admin
LOL! Where did you site his lack of progress, on his forehead?
to site: to place in or provide with a site; locate
to cite: to mention in support, proof, or confirmation
Admin
Uh. Right. Except there was no project plan, he was simply telling us to develop an application that he DID NOT KNOW WHAT IT WAS, WHAT IT DID, or WHAT IT HAD TO DO, in 2 weeks. Simply because he thought we could. Because he said "you're smart guys, I know you can do it". He did not even have the login information for the existing application the new one was being modeled on. He was emailed it but hadn't read that email yet. Had never logged in.
Do you understand?
It would be like me walking into your company, today, and telling you that that 3 month project you're about to embark on can be done in 3 weeks, just throw something together, you can tidy it up later. I'm a contractor and I'm going to be gone in 4 weeks time. You would simply bend over and take it, no wait, you'd write down a little "I concede defeat and accept no responsibilty for my actions" note as if that absolves you. Someone says "live in sh!t" and you agree to do so. That's your choice, but don't expect everyone else to do the same. Especially me.
The only reason I disagreed with him in the meeting (and the other 2 full-time developers were doing so also) was that I was not going to hang around and do the project if we were going to be forced to write sh!t. I had already saved 1 project, fixed another and completed a brand new one. All on time.
He was escorted from the building.
I did the project properly and finished it on time, and finished the next one a week early. Which I was 99% confident of doing, having spent the last 8 months developing / enhancing 3 projects that we were basing the final one on.
If I had have left, they would have been up sh!t creek without a paddle.
What kind of puncy world do you live in where people actually sign off on things?
-------
So let's say I did as you suggest. I submit my critique to him. He deletes or ignores it. There's no project plan. No formal spec. No functional spec. No test plan. I've mapped out a methodology that is going to allow us to do the project properly (8 weeks), and proven it, but we can't use it. He now is ejected from the building. All his email is gone. We've been working on the project for 2 weeks and it's nowhere near done.
What now?
Start again?
Keep going?
You idiot.
------
People that take an attempt at humour / story telling and act like they were there and pass judgement on what has been written are delusional. Just read the story and enjoy it or move on to the next one, quit being a righteous crusader for Those That Bend Over When Asked.
error: as in, you are in error for thinking your opinion matters one whit.
Admin
I'm surprised he knew what Visual Studio was? err, perhaps he didn't...