• AdT (unregistered) in reply to SpiritOfGrandeur
    SpiritOfGrandeur:
    AbbydonKrafts:
    Some people are so frigging paranoid. That's like saying "bomb" or "terrorist" in public nowadays. *sigh*

    Or using them in your postings to a public forum. We have your IP and will be contacting you shortly...

    BOMB!

    (No, you don't have my IP, you have the NAT router's IP. :-p)

    Captcha: Pirates (similiar to Terrorists)

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Shawn
    Shawn:
    Ha, so true. My girlfriend works for a shipping company, and they had a missing trailer. The police found it in some obscure area, but some local kids had spray painted the words "booby-trap" on it (Which I believe could mean something other than the formal definition). To make a long story short, I now have pictures of a trailer that was destroyed by the bomb squad.

    And as they blew up the trailer, the poison gas inside was released, bwahaha!

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Joel
    Joel:
    Gotta love that institutional memory our organizations work so hard to foster.

    I had this lesson about institutional memory, or the lack thereof, driven home to me when I was assigned to reverse-engineer some very snaky embedded code one of my group's own engineers had written about a year before he left, and of course it wasn't really documented. I did get to use an oscilloscope to debug that one though.

    I've done something similar, Motorola 98HC11 and 6809's and logic analyzer. The thing had a ribbon cable with a big alligator type clip you attached to the microproc.

    Kinda cool to watch the ASM code fly by. Not so cool when its 2am and your trying to get your final project for embedded systems done.

    Captcha: Pirates ARRR MATEY!

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    [code] @echo off cls echo Press any key to execute virus... pause>nul echo Deleting everything... And I mean *everything* ... mueheheh echo del *.* /s echo Delete *.*, Are you sure? echo Executing.... ping 127.0.0.1 -n 5 -w 1000>nul cls echo Finished! {/code]

    I wrote a similiar program at a programming exercise in school using gwbasic. It cleared the screen and printed something like "Formatting hard disk", and appended dots in a certain interval. My humor-amputated teacher came along to see what I was doing and stared at the screen in disbelief. I stopped the program and showed her the source code and said I was just toying around, but to no avail - I had to answer to the network administrator the next day and swear that I really didn't damage anything.

  • (cs) in reply to Shawn
    Shawn:
    Some people are so frigging paranoid. That's like saying "bomb" or "terrorist" in public nowadays. *sigh*

    Ha, so true. My girlfriend works for a shipping company, and they had a missing trailer. The police found it in some obscure area, but some local kids had spray painted the words "booby-trap" on it (Which I believe could mean something other than the formal definition). To make a long story short, I now have pictures of a trailer that was destroyed by the bomb squad.

    What type of bait do you use in a booby-trap (other than the formal definition)?

  • (cs)

    Not to change the subject or anything but I got my free sticker today!

    Thanks, Alex - it's the BOMB!

    Oops - bad choice of words.

  • Your Name (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT

    Fish. and probably some water

    :ahctpac scooter, but I wanted a segway =(

  • (cs)
    :
    Delete me
    Done.
  • (cs) in reply to PC Paul
    PC Paul:
    ...I ended up clocking the CPU at 0.5Hz while watching various lines with an oscilloscope... try and do that with a dual core wotsit, eh?
    You couldn't even do it with most CPUs at the time, I believe; the 6502's static implementation was rather unusual (eg. the 6809 couldn't be clocked below about 70kHz, I think, or it'd forget its registers' contents).
  • cookies (unregistered)

    "Tim Berners-Lee didn't create the Internet " ...

    he did according to the Discovery science cable channel .. Drives me nuts every time I see them run their misinformative infomercial

  • me (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Andy_Mac:
    LOL

    the first two WTFs are in the 2nd sentence though:

    • Tim Berners-Lee didn't create the Internet
    • There are no "Internets", there's only one

    But there are "internets" and you certainly can have more than one of those.

    the WWW is an internet that is part of the Internet.

    Interestingly you are so right that even where yo uare wrong it almost doesn't matter. intranet is basically short for intra-company network. In other words they are usually self contained. internet is an inter-company network, usually spanning more then one company. Please not where company is listed you can swap out school, institution, region, country, etc. The Internet (note always capitalized) is the largest internet. It contains subnets and domains. ARPAnet and MILNet are just two of the internets on the Internet. Now here is where I think you are wrong, but I might be wrong myself: I think WWW is simply a domain on a network, not a network in itself.

    The "Inter" in Internet/internet (interchangeable btw) is short for "International". You are correct on the "net" part though.

  • Newbius Maximus (unregistered) in reply to RevEng
    Tell them that nothing is certain in life. "Well, I did everything humanly possible for it to work, but there's an infinitesimal chance that your hard drive could instantly fail, negating all of the work I just did. Or more likely, Windows could have a hiccup and fail to start up. In either case, I've done everything that I possibly could to alleviate the problem, and so I am as confident as one can possibly be, but due to the nature of the universe, am not certain."

    They might not like the response, but at least you're being honest. :P

    Bah....I'm starting to think there's a significant percentage of people that only understand YES/NO, ON/OFF, WORKS_PERFECTLY/CRAPTACULARLY_BROKEN distinctions. Especially those with pointy hair. If you include all that detail about corner cases, they just get pissed off and suggest that you're trying to put something over on them.

  • Newbius Maximus (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    It's much more fun to put something like that under a menu entry called "Lusty Teens" and have it copy back and forth between two files so there's lots of disk activity and embarassment to go with the formatting message... ;)

  • Newbius Maximus (unregistered) in reply to Newbius Maximus

    Of course I meant that in response to this:

    I wrote a similiar program at a programming exercise in school using gwbasic. It cleared the screen and printed something like "Formatting hard disk", and appended dots in a certain interval. My humor-amputated teacher came along to see what I was doing and stared at the screen in disbelief. I stopped the program and showed her the source code and said I was just toying around, but to no avail - I had to answer to the network administrator the next day and swear that I really didn't damage anything.
  •  ☺ (unregistered) in reply to Newbius Maximus

    We know.

    The "in reply to 127020" is a bit of a giveaway, you see.

  • (cs) in reply to me
    me:

    The "Inter" in Internet/internet (interchangeable btw) is short for "International".

    ummmm... no.

    inter- a prefix occurring in loanwords from Latin, where it meant “between,” “among,” “in the midst of,” “mutually,” “reciprocally,” “together,” “during” (intercept; interest); on this model, used in the formation of compound words (intercom; interdepartmental).

    Although the Inter- in International also stems from this, the Inter- in Internet has nothing to do with -national.

  • drinkingbird (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Andy_Mac:
    LOL

    the first two WTFs are in the 2nd sentence though:

    • Tim Berners-Lee didn't create the Internet
    • There are no "Internets", there's only one

    But there are "internets" and you certainly can have more than one of those.

    the WWW is an internet that is part of the Internet.

    Interestingly you are so right that even where yo uare wrong it almost doesn't matter. intranet is basically short for intra-company network. In other words they are usually self contained. internet is an inter-company network, usually spanning more then one company. Please not where company is listed you can swap out school, institution, region, country, etc. The Internet (note always capitalized) is the largest internet. It contains subnets and domains. ARPAnet and MILNet are just two of the internets on the Internet. Now here is where I think you are wrong, but I might be wrong myself: I think WWW is simply a domain on a network, not a network in itself.

    The WWW is an annoying, broad term for all things HTML related. It's generally used to specifically refer to the convential uses of HTTP, as opposed to all Internet traffic. To put it another way, it's mostly a stupid and poorly defined marketing term. The original "Web 2.0".

  • Web 2.0 designer (unregistered) in reply to drinkingbird
    drinkingbird:
    The WWW is an annoying, broad term for all things HTML related. It's generally used to specifically refer to the convential uses of HTTP, as opposed to all Internet traffic. To put it another way, it's mostly a stupid and poorly defined marketing term. The original "Web 2.0".

    Dude. That's intense. 'Cuz, like, just the other day, my buddies and me were kickin' back some brew and like talkin' about how totally lame Web 1.0 was. Rounded corners are the shiznit! V-blogs are the one true way!

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Joe Public
    Joe Public:
    This program was a security nightmare, and cleaning it out was not a WTF.

    A self replicating anything that has the ability to diagnose the system is just an exploit waiting to happen.

    I tend to agree, but any self-respecting security professional who felt the same way would at least understand the difference between "a potential securty hole" and "an actual virus" and act accordingly.

    The insecurity professional in question, however, saw the word "virus" and severly overreacted in an excessively destructive manner.

    A security expert not understanding basic security is much more WTF-worthy than a developer writing potentially insecure code, even if the original script probably deserved to be on this site in its own right.

  • FTW (unregistered)

    I miss gopher.

    captcha: pointer

    setter?

  • Miral (unregistered) in reply to GettinSadda
    GettinSadda:
    Take one or more I/O lines and stuff debug values on them while the program runs - scope these and see what the code is doing - it's the only way if you have no screen or serial port!
    Or if you do have a serial port, but you're trying to monitor the length of time spent in a fast loop, and writing to the serial port would inject far too much delay and make the information worthless :)

    CAPTCHA: sanitarium (excellent game!)

  • rofl (unregistered) in reply to Shawn

    Those special experts. Do they seriously think that any person who writes a virus is a:

    going to comment it

    b:

    going to say its a virus

    Must have been a woman.

  • (cs)

    I think he made it self-reproducing (Like a virus!!!) because with a peer to peer system like that it would at least be more reliable.

    And yeah, the world is getting even lamer. I mean when did you hear the word "terrorist" before recently? Now fucking crackhead kids ask me "Are you a terrorist" as some kind of joke when I tell them I'm not feeling like dealing with their crap.

    Another thing that pisses me off is the idea of email viruses. It is for the most part a myth, but my Mom is always worried about getting viruses from email. I tell her that its pretty much impossible to put a self-replicating virus in an email but she doesn't believe me.

    FUD is everywhere. Hip hip hooray.

  • Hans (unregistered) in reply to Will
    Will:
    Troy Mclure:
    To which I reply - Yes it IS all set. And you WILL not have any problems with it now.

    In my experience, if you say that, invariably they have a problem with "it" that's totally unrelated to what you did, an d blame you for it.

    Absolutely right. At one point I got blamed for an intermittent power failure that caused both computers and a bunch of other equipment to fail. I had installed software on the computers, so when they crashed it was my fault. And then the other equipment was also found to have crashed, so naturally that was also caused by my software.

    The funny thing was that the other equipment was not even computer controlled to begin with...

    As for making statements about whether something is fixed or not, the first poster is also right about that. If you are 99% sure something is fixed make it 100%, or you will be tormented forever in stupid meetings to discuss "risk", and be blamed for every stupid little thing that happens (copier out of paper? --> Ah ha! I knew that bug was still there!), and end up losing all the confidence your customer might have had in you.

    And if you are unlucky enough to encounter that 1% scenario where it was still broken, just brazenly lie and tell them it is another problem, unrelated to the first.

  • DOA (unregistered) in reply to drinkingbird

    A rose by any other name

  • (cs)

    At least he was lucky he'd already quit before it hit the fan.

    Getting fired for calling your project a "virus" would suck in a very original way.

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    An Oscilloscope to debug code? Where do you connect the probes?
    If you don't know how to debug using an oscilloscope, you have no business developing embedded real-time systems.
  • Smitty (unregistered)

    ... of the time I was working for a now defunct accounting software firm (back in the early 90's). At some point I was playing around with a calendaring system which would check a calender table to see what start-of-day and eod-of-day processing it had to perform. Of course some of the processes were little more than notices or reminders (example: "You should issue a backup today") while others were more sophisticated and would automatically take some programatic action on the data in the accounting system. While I was testing my efforts I also wrote a small calendar import utility which could import those aforesaid 'notices' from common e-mail apps. While doing this, I subsequently saved my own imported calendar into the 'release' (actually a sample database that would frequently be used by customers without even clearing down the shipped data) which got shipped to customers around the country.

    A customer called tech support some time later claiming that her machine had a virus from our software because when she started the app it produced a message "Get down and dirty with <My Date's Name>, blowjob predicted" (this was a date to go see a live concert with a really horny girl I knew at the time). I was called into the Senior Managers office and was fired for shipping software with a virus in it. I protested but of course, being young and naive didn't realise how rediculous the whole scenario was. Luckily I didn't really like the job, and back then if you could spell 'C++' you were hired, so it didn't effect me much.

  • Meatwad (unregistered) in reply to AbbydonKrafts
    AbbydonKrafts:
    Some people are so frigging paranoid. That's like saying "bomb" or "terrorist" in public nowadays. *sigh*

    Or putting Light Bright under a bridge in Boston.

  • sodhi (unregistered) in reply to Shawn
    Shawn:
    Some people are so frigging paranoid. That's like saying "bomb" or "terrorist" in public nowadays. *sigh*

    Ha, so true. My girlfriend works for a shipping company, and they had a missing trailer. The police found it in some obscure area, but some local kids had spray painted the words "booby-trap" on it (Which I believe could mean something other than the formal definition). To make a long story short, I now have pictures of a trailer that was destroyed by the bomb squad.

    It's funny how we sometimes read stuff wrong, althought we're quite knowingly about it's wrongness. I read that as 'a stripping company'.

  • (cs) in reply to anon
    anon:
    Troy Mclure:
    Wording is truly everything.

    I have gotten into saying "Yup should be all set" and "You shouldn't have any problems with it now". Certain people hear that and freak out saying "Wait - you mean you think its ok but you're not sure? It should be all set, or it is all set?"

    To which I reply - Yes it IS all set. And you WILL not have any problems with it now.

    I hate people.

    I do the opposite. I always deliberately say "should be all set" rather than "it IS all set". Guess it's a cultural thing, but I've yet to have anybody flip out and say "what do you mean 'should', aren't you sure?" but I have had people say "you told me yesterday it was definitely fixed!"

    I always say "It's fixed in theory"

  • (cs) in reply to cookies
    cookies:
    "Tim Berners-Lee didn't create the Internet " ...

    he did according to the Discovery science cable channel .. Drives me nuts every time I see them run their misinformative infomercial

    Or the commercial for... MSNBC? One of the news channels. "25 years ago we started, before there was the internet."

  • Troy Mclure (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    Troy Mclure:
    Wording is truly everything.

    I have gotten into saying "Yup should be all set" and "You shouldn't have any problems with it now". Certain people hear that and freak out saying "Wait - you mean you think its ok but you're not sure? It should be all set, or it is all set?"

    To which I reply - Yes it IS all set. And you WILL not have any problems with it now.

    I hate people.

    I do the opposite. I always deliberately say "should be all set" rather than "it IS all set". Guess it's a cultural thing, but I've yet to have anybody flip out and say "what do you mean 'should', aren't you sure?" but I have had people say "you told me yesterday it was definitely fixed!"

    I agree because I like to say the same thing. But certain customers/client/end users take it too literally, and others just plain don't like to hear doubt.

    Its a lose-lose situation. If you say that something is all fixed, if it ever breaks you will not hear the end of it. But on the other hand if you continually say it "should" then your customer/client..etc starts doubting you.

    I mean personally I'd rather hear from Sony "We have fixed the problem with our batteries" than "We are almost positive we have fixed the battery problem, but there is a remote 1% chance it will still explode and give you 3rd degree burns and scar you for life". Nothing is 100%, but sometimes you have to give people some reassurance you've actually fixed it.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    The way I look at it is, if a simple fix worked every time and there were never any mitigating circumstances, then the problems would be solved with saying "RTFM" to the users, or for someone to build an automated system to diagnose and repair problems without human intervention. When I worked in IT, it was always 'should'. To say that there is no chance for any more problems is a lie.

    Frankly, promising that there are no more problems is just false bravado. If a user wants to feel that all is right in the world, they should start taking a seratonin inhibitor. If they want their computer to have the best chance of running without bumps and having those bumps solved as quickly as is possible, they should hire a competent IT staff.

  • (cs)

    Woow, I'f that "security expert" couldnt discerne between "nice code" and "killer code" He diserved to be fired.

    Now, some user are natural born paranos. That's the reason why I use pretty euphemisms when I need to feedback an user about some error. Instead of saying "I/O ERROR" I say "There was an issue openning your file" or stuff like that.

  • Reed (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    Troy Mclure:
    Wording is truly everything.

    I have gotten into saying "Yup should be all set" and "You shouldn't have any problems with it now". Certain people hear that and freak out saying "Wait - you mean you think its ok but you're not sure? It should be all set, or it is all set?"

    To which I reply - Yes it IS all set. And you WILL not have any problems with it now.

    I hate people.

    I do the opposite. I always deliberately say "should be all set" rather than "it IS all set". Guess it's a cultural thing, but I've yet to have anybody flip out and say "what do you mean 'should', aren't you sure?" but I have had people say "you told me yesterday it was definitely fixed!"

    Don't say "everything is working perfectly", instead say "I fixed your specific problem." After all, that's really what you did. You have no way of knowing exactly what else is going on in the system.

  • Decade (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Andy_Mac:
    But there are "internets" and you certainly can have more than one of those.

    the WWW is an internet that is part of the Internet.

    internet is an inter-company network, usually spanning more then one company.

    The Internet (note always capitalized) is the largest internet. It contains subnets and domains.

    Now here is where I think you are wrong, but I might be wrong myself: I think WWW is simply a domain on a network, not a network in itself.

    Ugh. That this hasn't been corrected (correctly) astonishes me.

    The World Wide Web is an application of the Internet. The way TBL wanted it, all web pages linking together could be considered a single system of inter-connected knowledge.

    Now to tackle "internet." An internet is a network of networks. In the fun old days, we could build an internet in a single organization, because the Internet Protocol presented a unified way for applications to communicate over Ethernet, Token Ring, frame relay, ATM, serial lines, AppleTalk networks, and so on, and made communication among separate network segments easy.

    Then, when pretty much everybody settled on Ethernet and IP, and business-folk wanted a term to distinguish their networks from the Internet, they invented the term "intranet."

  • z0idberg (unregistered) in reply to drinkingbird
    drinkingbird:
    .........The original "Web 2.0".

    So its the Web then?

  • (cs) in reply to Icehawke
    I have gotten into saying "Yup should be all set" and "You shouldn't have any problems with it now". Certain people hear that and freak out saying "Wait - you mean you think its ok but you're not sure? It should be all set, or it is all set?"

    I have a boss like that.

    And boy is he annoying - whenever there is anything "I think" should be fixed, the next dozen random unrelated glitches automatically become my fault.

  • (cs) in reply to Spacecoyote
    Spacecoyote:
    I mean when did you hear the word "terrorist" before recently?

    E.T.

  • JBourrie (unregistered)

    "The "Inter" in Internet/internet (interchangeable btw) is short for "International"."

    The "W" in WTF is short for "WTF", which this comments section is full of. I swear, some of these comments are funnier than anything on the main page. Thank you for making my Friday afternoon a little bit brighter :)

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Will Perdikakis
    Will Perdikakis:
    Note for the future:

    Do not say "Hi Jack" in an airport. Do not write virus in comments

    X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

    :-)

  • (cs) in reply to cookies
    cookies:
    "Tim Berners-Lee didn't create the Internet " ...

    he did according to the Discovery science cable channel .. Drives me nuts every time I see them run their misinformative infomercial

    At least they didn't say that matter was created at oceanic ridges... oh, wait. They did. Black holes, white holes, plate tectonics, all the same thing.

    Sadly, no sarcasm tag.

  • prof_hobart (unregistered) in reply to ThingGuy McGuyThing
    ThingGuy McGuyThing:
    I think I'll file this under "the real WTF is in the comments".

    These guys were sending an executable file to their clients, and the clients were running them. There was already nothing to stop a malicious tech from sending out a malicious executable under the same name. This utility had been tested through use by a ton of clients - why change it when it's obviously working as intended, and no problems have come up?

    No, maybe it's not the "best possible way ever", but it was working fine, and certainly not a "security nightmare".

    It's true that the app itself was doing nothing more than exploiting an already existing hole, but that hole was a security nightmare and should have been fixed. The problem is that they were fixing a symptom not the cause.

  • (cs) in reply to Superlexx
    Superlexx:
    LOL

    the first two WTFs are in the 2nd sentence though:

    • Tim Berners-Lee didn't create the Internet
    • There are no "Internets", there's only one

    Exactly. Everyone knows that Al Gore invented the first Internet, and George W. Bush invented the rest of the Internets.

  • Joe K (unregistered) in reply to cookies

    I saw a piece about a compressed-air powered french car on Discovery channel. The narrator actually was amazed at how the compressed air might run a generator... which could compress more air! It can run itself for free! He actually had the gall to say it could be a perpetual motion machine.

    From now on I am not letting my nephew watch Discovery channel. You get the same information in an hour of Discovery channel as you do with about 5 minutes with Wikipedia, assuming you can read.

  • Magnus (unregistered) in reply to AbbydonKrafts

    OMG! You said the "B" word, on the internets!

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:
    Wording is truly everything.

    I have gotten into saying "Yup should be all set" and "You shouldn't have any problems with it now". Certain people hear that and freak out saying "Wait - you mean you think its ok but you're not sure? It should be all set, or it is all set?"

    To which I reply - Yes it IS all set. And you WILL not have any problems with it now.

    I hate people.

    Have you considered converting to Islam? Then you would be prohibited from referring to any future event without adding the proviso that it will happen if God wills it -- and you always have an out! :)

    Captcha: Gotcha.

  • al (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    Shawn:
    Some people are so frigging paranoid. That's like saying "bomb" or "terrorist" in public nowadays. *sigh*

    Ha, so true. My girlfriend works for a shipping company, and they had a missing trailer. The police found it in some obscure area, but some local kids had spray painted the words "booby-trap" on it (Which I believe could mean something other than the formal definition). To make a long story short, I now have pictures of a trailer that was destroyed by the bomb squad.

    What type of bait do you use in a booby-trap (other than the formal definition)?

  • marice (unregistered) in reply to Shawn

    oh my god....

    do not let me virus your computers when you open this website.... im a virus creator biatch!!!!!

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