• Zygo (unregistered) in reply to sf
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    cconroy:

    Anonymous:
    I had a co-worker ask me:

    How do you tell if a number is negative?

    Ask it whether the glass is half empty or half full.

    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).

     ...

     Aaah, the CDC Cyber.  Takes me back...

    Just when I was sure that I was the only person on Earth subjected to the things.  ;-)

    Another cute feature was the variable-length character encoding (12 bit characters instead of six).  Or maybe it was a choice of two fixed-length character encodings determined by the first character on the line.  I can't remember any more.  It was the only way to get the extended character set (known to the rest of us as "lower case ASCII and control characters") out of the machine.

  • William (unregistered) in reply to mep
    Anonymous:

    In my workplace, we have the "william wiki" for quoatable quotes from our lovable coworker william, here's a few entries:

     "there are no beautiful woman engineers"

    "vanna white (the price is right model) has the PERFECT job for a woman"

    "are you on crack?"

     

    Hmm, not looking good.  I am a firm believer that there are no beautiful women engineers and I have also asked if people are on crack several times.  I don't recall ever bringing up the Vanna White comment but who knows...

     

     

  • (cs)

    Being the only person in a computer tech/management orientated university with any clue about how either computer technology or management systems actually work besides one or two of the lecturers (hooray for higher education), I often ended up the de facto tutor/repairing of horribly broken PCs.

    One person in question was frantic. "My printer doesn't work! I think it's broken! I've already had five experts look at it and they can't fix it! Help!"

    I examined the long-weathered laptop for 3 seconds and noticed that she'd plugged her printer's USB cable into her laptop's LAN port, which I swapped into an actual USB port immediately. Experts indeed.

    Secondly, I had to tutor about ten students in a web design / web programming class..... how to write HTML code. Apparently, the class lecturer was of the opinion that everyone knew HTML code from birth.

    And as an establishmentary WTF, one of my electronic commerce management classes included this gem in one of the assignments....

    "For the webpages you will be creating for this assignment, we recommend you use Microsoft Frontpage XP, which is available from some bittorrent websites on the internet. Frontpage is a high-quality HTML generator that lets you generate professional-quality webpages in just a few clicks."

    Mhr, it's so very wrong in so many ways.

  • (cs) in reply to DrPizza
    DrPizza:
    Anonymous:

    I can't comment on the rest of it, but this is true.  The magnetic domains on a hard-drive are re-written when they are read.  Just one of the reasons regular back-ups mean you won't need the back-ups.

    Huh?  Since when?  Some HD tech (metal-in-gap) even uses different heads for read and write.  How can the read heads rewrite the data?

    Of course they have to rewrite the data when it's read, otherwise the centrifugal force will fragment it too much. If you leave it too long the data will be pushed off the edge of the platters and then you're in real trouble, with all those bytes lying around, how do you know what order to put them back in? I thought everyone knew that.

    http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/101509.aspx

  • Archon (unregistered)

    Our DBA:

     "SQL Database MUST be in a LIKE STATE before Replication can begin!!! We have to go up to the colo at 3AM, shut down the webfarm database SQL instance, back up the database to a USB drive, bring the database back here, restore it, then start both SQL instances at the exact same moment!!"

     

  • C Serpent V (unregistered) in reply to Sean

    > "What's CSV?".

    Um, CSV is an incredibly lame format. 20 years of programming without encountering it is not only quite possible, but enviable.

  • RofRoyle (unregistered) in reply to Mike

    You can put the version number in it, then use Reflection to get at it, so you can use it in more than one place (Help About, a label on a form somewhere, etc) and be certain it's always going to be consistent. And having it in there makes it easy to check it quickly.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Zygo
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    DWalker59:
    Anonymous:

    "Files on a server will deteriorate over time and need to be refreshed" -- director of computing and networking at a relatively popular travel booking agency."

    I can't comment on the rest of it, but this is true.  The magnetic domains on a hard-drive are re-written when they are read.  Just one of the reasons regular back-ups mean you won't need the back-ups.

    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?

    I think what the original was trying to get across is that by reading the data on the drive, it reinforces the magnetic integrity. 

    Reading data doesn't do anything for the magnetic integrity, it just reduces the drive's remaining service lifetime.

    Some drives do ECC testing on the data, and will recover and remap sectors with unacceptably high bit error rates.  Most drives will actually not remap the sector, but mark it as "pending" and remap it later only if it continues to be bad after new data is written in the sector, because there are few spare sectors and you don't want to go filling them up--permanently--because of a transient read failure.  Hopefully your drive will make a temporary copy of the "pending" sector in the spare sector area, or you'll lose your data.  This feature set is usually accompanied by a command set which tells the drive to read its entire surface during idle time to find these sectors, and another which forces the remapping to occur immediately (this is what the various "data recovery" utilities from the hard disk vendors do).

    Cheap hard disks have atrocious firmware problems, so it's most likely that your drive will just lock up or corrupt data without telling you, instead of all this warm and fuzzy data recovery stuff.

    Reading data from a magnetic hard drive does in fact reinforce the magnetic integrity of the data itself.  Note that this is different from actually rewriting the data.

  • @trophy (unregistered) in reply to Simmo
    Anonymous:
    John Hensley:

    I would not be surprised if this difference were motivated more by French hypernationalism than any technical concerns.

    ... And that comment demonstrates anglocentricism (or perhaps North American stereotyping of French people?). The whole of Europe uses commas as decimal points. There is life outside your continent.

     

    captcha: perfection. Of course. Naturally.

     

    México uses them too... but only in money...  

  • sdancer (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    EvanED:

     That's not what he was saying... It wasn't "France uses commas because of hypernationalism." It was "the French version of Excel uses a different "C"SV format than the US version because of hypernationalism."

     I have no clue if this is true (the fact that they can escape commas lends a little credence to it anyway), but I think you misunderstood.

     No, it's MS being too stupid to understand locales properly and to export in a common locale that can then be reimported without such dumb problems. Recently, Oblivion (a game for those who don't know) had a similar problem with being unable to properly save settings in non-English versions of the game because of a similar problem.

     Nationalism has nothing to do with it, it's just a bug, and a pretty stupid one too. It's pretty trivial to separate numbers and their representation.
     

  • usagi (unregistered)

    A former team member, whom we refered to as 'Snoop-Dog', once asked how he could dump out the contents of an object the application log:

    DM:        Did you implement toString() ?
    Snoop:    toString ?
    DM:        Yes.....toString
    Snoop:    You mean 't', 'o', 'String' ?
    DM:        Yes....toString
    Snoop:    I've never heard of that - what does it do ?

    At this point the guy had been employed as a Java developer for around 5 years. Everybody on the team knew he was f***ing useless, but someone he held on to his job year after year. We finally made an effort to force him out of our team, he's now working in sales - where knowledge of toString is not mandatory.
     

  • jwillow (unregistered) in reply to tmountjr
    tmountjr:

    A few weeks ago I had a user call in about a program that was printing documents in reverse order. For whatever reason I couldn't remotely connect to her computer, so I asked her to reboot, figuring this would fix both problems at once.

     

    Her: If I reboot, then you might not be able to see the problem.

    Me: If you try printing and it works right, then I won't need to see the problem.

    Her: But how will you fix it if it happens again?

    Me: That's why we're rebooting.

    Her: But I don't want to reboot. It might solve the problem and you won't be able to see it!

    Me (getting a little frustrated): Just reboot the computer.

     

    First time I've had a customer who was more concerned about me seeing a problem than fixing it. 

    Sorry, I'm with the user on this one.  Intermittent problems are the hardest to solve because of the difficulty in reproducing them consistently, so she was absolutely right in wanting you to see it while it was occurring. 

  • Gilhad (unregistered) in reply to Scottford

    [quote user=Anonymous] ... We were doing this in pascal. ... At the time, I was regularly involved in the demo scene and was pretty adept at x86 ASM. .... My pascal code was pretty clean, lots of comments and decent style - typical suck-up code written by someone trying to impress....[/quote]

    [quote user="Scottford"] I would have given you an F. You're writing a business app, not a graphical demo. Ease of maintenance is paramount. Assembly code is totally unnecessary and hard to maintain. For exactly the reasons that the graders pointed out (even if only by coincidence). [/quote]

    So for these, who still did not get it.

    The program was writeen in PASCAL and documented. The only "joke" was using as a counter variable called "cx" instead of "i". And using variables named "ax" and "bx" for coordinates... Which both give a lot of sence to anyone who is used to ASM for graphics. And which is totally legal to use in PASCAL application too, if properly commented. Maybe not in commercial grade application, but in school work for sure. I would not drop the ranking for such evident joke, as long as other variables will be named correctly. Would I will not be familiar with ASM, I would at least ask student first, why such convention and then decide on th answer, if it has some meaning or not.

    /CAPTCHA: ewww ... I think the same about rating something F just for ignorance of the teacher.

  • davetherave (unregistered) in reply to Ian

    NOT over fixed-length record files:

    fixed-length record files can have no buffer overflows, required no delimiters to be defined and are the easiest and fastest to parse with no need to quote or escape characters.

    Have a seperate file that defines the width of each field.

    Total the widths and allocate a buffer of that size.

    Read n bytes and chop it up as per the field widths.

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to vr602
    vr602:
    Yeeerst, but the amusing/irritating/futile/eccentric joy of being the UK is that we are part of Europe and yet not. Nominally, yes; we pay preposterous taxes to subsidise dodgy continental olive-growers and the Brussels gravy-train like everyone else, but on the other hand we drink beer in pints ( good ), drive on the left ( why not? ) in miles ( ok ), pay in our own currency not Euros( good IMO ), and measure ourselves in feet and inches ( futile ). Oh and we use decimal point to mean decimal point, unlike all the rest of Europe, so CSV is definitely an anglo-targeted format, and one that clearly sux. I wonder if the comma as decimal point was a French Revolutionary invention, like most SI units? That would explain why Britain never took it up ( like most SI units ).

    Strange: Britain does practically everything in metric now except drinking, driving, and both, and even then sometimes they use "yards" as a shorthand for "metres". Also, straight from the manual, automobile and other road vehicle dimensions are given in metres even in Britain. For something related to the rest of the thread, if not the article, I remember a programming class where a fellow student had used escaped literal commas as thousands seperators in a CSV: The teacher had... words... with him, to the effect that not only is, for example, 300,000km/s bad CSV-filing, it is not even valid metric, and instead either 300000 km/s or 300 000 kms[sup]-1[/sup] (superscripted -1 in case the BBCode fails), where spaces can be read either as normal spaces or ctrl-shift-space characters to allow wrapping as a single word. Do not even ask about the person who wrote k(m[sup]3[/sup]).

  • Not the same guy (unregistered) in reply to QueerEye
    QueerEye:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    The full-timers said I was far too abrupt / brusqe with him - calling him on his BS and generally not backing down on my desire to "code it properly". He seemed adamant that we could just throw it together then we would have time later to "go back and do it properly, later". Our meetings were basically hammer fests of him saying XYZ and me saying "uh, no, you can't say that and we aren't going to do it like that". After one such meeting, we dispersed, and one of the non-developer types sitting a cubicle away stood up and fvcking applauded me, saying they agreed with my attitude of "do it right the first time". That was something I had not seen before.
    The full-timers were right. 'Calling people's bs' in a meeting is really bad form. Especially in the condescending way you did. For whatever reason they hired the walrus as the project manager, not you. You should have documented your critique of his project plan, presented it to him before development and got him to sign off that he had read it. Then, you do it his way and point to the document at the post-mortem.When developers push back, most people think it's because we are lazy and\or egotistical. Many times it's true. Doing it this way shows that it is not the case.
    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. 

    It obviously mattered enough that you threw together a novella about why his opinion does not matter. Pathetic.

    No, it's a novella about why that opinion would wreak havoc and destruction if it was put into practice in that situation, not because it's irrelevant, but because it's just plain dangerous. And to take the meta/high-road approach, you have to intentionally misunderstand what you're criticizing, which just makes you look like the idiot instead of him.

    It's a powerful weapon, but only if it's wielded wisely and sparingly. Used improperly, it can make you into an absolute twit, because you don't have a real argument, you just want to sound like you do... the consequence of this is that the point you're trying to make is flimsier than a chair made of carefully balanced toothpicks, and will fall apart under the slightest scrutiny.

  • atwork (unregistered) in reply to chris travers

    During a test in my first programming class(c++) I wrote the modular arithmatic function "%" from scratch. I lost points on the test for not knowing that it already existed. C'mon, that was my first programming class ever!

  • Frodo Baggins (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird

    Resource limits - use them to limit the number of processes a user can start.

    RLIMIT_NPROC The maximum number of threads that can be created for the real user ID of the calling process. Upon encountering this limit, fork() fails with the error EAGAIN.

    From 'man ulimit' - -u or --process-count The maximum number of processes available to a single user

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