The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

I really cannot believe it. Really no. How can anyone be SO wimp and just silently accept the ignorant unjustice. Especially when his graduation depends on it. I lived in a Soviet Union and even in THOSE times when professors had god-like powers something like that could not happen. One still had at least some other instances for appeal.

CAPTCHA: delenit - a mineral causing random file deletion

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

00Davo:
Mike:
Bill G:
If bubble sort was the easiest, most intuitive algorithm to implement, I'd say you had a point. I think there are far easier algorithms to implement even in the case where you knew there would only be 10 or 20 elements to sort.
for( int i = 0; i < length - 1; i++ ) {
  for( j = i + 1; j < length; j++ ) {
    if( arr[i] > arr[j] ) {
      swap( arr, i, j );
    }
  }
}
I'd like to see your simpler algorithm. (And no, calling a library function does not count.)
do {
  arr.shuffle();
} while (!arr.sorted());

You win!

Chewbacca · 2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Gosh, that's plausible, at least if we assume some liberties were taken with the dialog. Sucks to be him.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Jay:
Matt Westwood:
Any CS major in his final year deserves to be immediately flunked for the whole degree for writing a bubblesort. And thence also indelibly tattooed on the forehead with "Unfit to work in IT" or whatever. *Anyone* who still thinks a bubblesort is a cool idea in final year has tantamountly never learned anything since the first semester.

So if you were working in an environment where no sort function was available in the library, and you had a problem where you had to sort what you knew would be a max of 10 or 20 values in real life, you would write and debug a complex but more efficient sorting algorithm, because bubble sort is beneath our dignity? Sounds like a big waste of time to me.

Yep, every time. I know how to do other types of sorting so I'd use them instead. Just because it's only going to be used for 10 or 20 values isn't a reason. If there is genuinely no sort function in the library, then someone else is going to have the same problem later. And knowing what I do, it would be professionally negligent of me in that situation to use a bubblesort. There is no such thing as a one-use program.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Because the source code probably has a similar name, and because any dean dumb enough to do what this one did isn't going to know the difference between Blackjack.exe and Blackjack.cpp?

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Have you dealt with any university bureaucracies, lately (as a student)? Even getting simple things with administrators done can take months. Getting professors to respond to requests or e-mails is always hit-or-miss, and getting them to go up against the dean? Even if the professor was leaving, that's a tough sell. Yes, he probably could have tried harder, but if he is a senior, and doesn't plan on going to graduate school anytime soon, then it really makes no difference what his actual grade in the class is. Of course, he could simply have shot his professor an e-mail and dropped a floppy or zip disk of at his office containing the relevant files.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Offf:
I really cannot believe it. Really no. How can anyone be SO wimp and just silently accept the ignorant unjustice. Especially when his graduation depends on it. I lived in a Soviet Union and even in THOSE times when professors had god-like powers something like that could not happen. One still had at least some other instances for appeal.
CAPTCHA: delenit - a mineral causing random file deletion

The Soviet Union was a utopia of blessed freedom compared with the jackbooted fascist hellholes that call themselves "schools" in America.

Remember, until you're 21 you're not considered fully human in the land of the "free".

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

The real WTF here is Andy's lack of any kind of social solution to this problem.

All he had to do was tell his prof. what had happened, the prof. would have informed the Dean that yes, those files are assignments he had assigned.

I just don't believe that this would not have occurred to Andy unless he was severely autistic...

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

TRWTF is that no one has cried foal on this one...

Someone You Know · 2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Offf:
I really cannot believe it. Really no. How can anyone be SO wimp and just silently accept the ignorant unjustice. Especially when his graduation depends on it. I lived in a Soviet Union and even in THOSE times when professors had god-like powers something like that could not happen. One still had at least some other instances for appeal.
CAPTCHA: delenit - a mineral causing random file deletion

The Soviet Union was a utopia of blessed freedom compared with the jackbooted fascist hellholes that call themselves "schools" in America.

Remember, until you're 21 you're not considered fully human in the land of the "free".

Arguably 25, actually, since in many places you cannot rent a car until this age.

Someone You Know · 2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Someone You Know:
Matt Westwood:
Offf:
I really cannot believe it. Really no. How can anyone be SO wimp and just silently accept the ignorant unjustice. Especially when his graduation depends on it. I lived in a Soviet Union and even in THOSE times when professors had god-like powers something like that could not happen. One still had at least some other instances for appeal.
CAPTCHA: delenit - a mineral causing random file deletion

The Soviet Union was a utopia of blessed freedom compared with the jackbooted fascist hellholes that call themselves "schools" in America.

Remember, until you're 21 you're not considered fully human in the land of the "free".

Arguably 25, actually, since in many places you cannot rent a car until that age.

Or 35, since you legally can't serve as President of the United States until that age.

Or 65, since you probably can't get a senior discount everywhere until that age.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Cheong:
This is unbelievable.
Given the length of elementry C++ courses at the days, the compiled size tops at 500k even with debug information.

Is there any network game that students have desire to play, have folder size less than 1 MB? If the network admin cannot get a hint, he deserved to be fired.

If you pay a little more attention you'll realise that this all happened a good ten years ago when sub MB games were still pretty common. How do we know this? Well, when was the last time you saw a ZIP disk? Exactly.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

[quote user="Nobody Said it Happened Yesterday"] Is there any network game that students have desire to play, have folder size less than 1 MB? If the network admin cannot get a hint, he deserved to be fired.[/quote] If you pay a little more attention you'll realise that this all happened a good ten years ago when sub MB games were still pretty common. How do we know this? Well, when was the last time you saw a ZIP disk? Exactly.[/quote]

The point still stands. You write a bubble sort program in Turbo C++ or whatever was in vogue at the time, the executable will be, what, 2 or 3K in size?

Whereas a network game like Doom would have been at least a meg or two, plus the size of the support files (WADs or whatever they were called).

Captcha: gravis - yeah, I remember those game pads too

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Bill G:
If bubble sort was the easiest, most intuitive algorithm to implement, I'd say you had a point. I think there are far easier algorithms to implement even in the case where you knew there would only be 10 or 20 elements to sort.

Dumbass..

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

whiskeyjack:
Nobody Said it Happened Yesterday:
Cheong:
Is there any network game that students have desire to play, have folder size less than 1 MB? If the network admin cannot get a hint, he deserved to be fired.
If you pay a little more attention you'll realise that this all happened a good ten years ago when sub MB games were still pretty common. How do we know this? Well, when was the last time you saw a ZIP disk? Exactly.

The point still stands. You write a bubble sort program in Turbo C++ or whatever was in vogue at the time, the executable will be, what, 2 or 3K in size?

Whereas a network game like Doom would have been at least a meg or two, plus the size of the support files (WADs or whatever they were called).

Captcha: gravis - yeah, I remember those game pads too

Fair enough, you should be able to tell a trivial C++ app from a full-on game whatever its size. Having said that, you can't assume everyone is playing 3D first person shooters. Back when I was in school we were pleased just to get Commander Keen running in DOS (I don't remember the filesize but I remember the whole thing fitted on a single floppy). This would have been a long time before this story was set but you can still have a lot of fun with games that weigh in at sub MB sizes.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

When I was in high school , we had a variety of proggramming classes. When we were caught up on assignments we were allowed to play Counter Strike on the LAN and so we did until one fateful day some bitch ass substitute teacher complained that the game "encouraged terrorism" and we were forced to remove it.

It was quickly replaced by Team Fortress...

daily · 2010-11-11 Reply Admin

But maybe Bubble Sort really was a game...

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

boog:
Jay:
So if you were working in an environment where no sort function was available in the library, and you had a problem where you had to sort what you knew would be a max of 10 or 20 values in real life, you would write and debug a complex but more efficient sorting algorithm, because bubble sort is beneath our dignity? Sounds like a big waste of time to me.
Think about it though. If you just spent the extra time to construct a quick sort or merge sort in this hypothetical-but-still-business-specific-with-many-possible-caveats environment, the total number of unnoticeable nanoseconds that the more-complex algorithm would save over a bubble sort in the lifetime of the application might almost add up to just barely more than the total amount of time you spent farting around with the implementation and maintenance of said complex sort.
So in the end, wouldn't that make it all worth it?

Sheesh can everyone just shut up about the bubble sort tangent!

A: Contrary to popular belief, quicksort didn't exist on all platforms in the era of zip disks.

B: If it's an assignment to implement a bubble sort, then well that's kindof what one has to do to pass. Calling a library function = epic fail.

frits · 2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Anonymous Bystander:
TRWTF - no-one commented about the following:
American Maid:
That may be how you blokes do it at your fancy English Universities like Oxford or Yale, but we Americans like to multitask our way through courses. Why else would they encorage us to bring out laptops to every class?

When did Yale University move to England ?

( and on the off-chance it refers to Yale College - that isn't in England either, it's in Wales... )

I'm assuming the post was intented to be ironic, poking fun at some traditional stereotypes, but if no-one comments, doesn't that justify those very stereotypes...

Good eye, Tuck!

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

Why did the Andy in the story not stand up for himself, and cut the dean off?

This is what I'd do.

D: "Ah, bubblesort.exe. Yes, my children play that one at home..." A: "I'm sorry, but may I interrupt you at this juncture?" D: "No, let me finish." A: "Tough, you're going to hear this. bubblesort-is-a-test-of-implementing-a-sinking-sort-to-scan-through-a-list-and-put-them-in-order-manually-based-on-a-given-criterion-blackjack-is-a-test-at-random-number-generation-and-validation-slot-machine-is-a-test-of-threading-and-powerlaw-demonstrates-that-we-can-use-the-math-libraries." D: "I'm warning you. I could have you thrown out for this! I won't tolerate it!" A: "So? I'll just say you're trying to get rid of me because I'm gay." D: "But you're not gay." A: "Ah, so bending the truth is alright for a dean but not alright for a student? It's great that I got this whole conversation recorded on my iPhone." D: "..."

I'd probably leave it there.

Captcha: usitas (v.) 1. A better name for su if you're not intending to become root?

Captain Oblivious · 2010-11-11 Reply Admin

boog:
Jay:
So if you were working in an environment where no sort function was available in the library, and you had a problem where you had to sort what you knew would be a max of 10 or 20 values in real life, you would write and debug a complex but more efficient sorting algorithm, because bubble sort is beneath our dignity? Sounds like a big waste of time to me.
Think about it though. If you just spent the extra time to construct a quick sort or merge sort in this hypothetical-but-still-business-specific-with-many-possible-caveats environment, the total number of unnoticeable nanoseconds that the more-complex algorithm would save over a bubble sort in the lifetime of the application might almost add up to just barely more than the total amount of time you spent farting around with the implementation and maintenance of said complex sort.
So in the end, wouldn't that make it all worth it?

I just found TRWTF. QuickSort is not "complex". It can be written in under three lines of code, and it is significantly faster than bubble sort. Moreover, the only way to save time in testing a sorting algorithm over another sorting algorithm is to not test one but test the other. Aren't you testing your bubble sort? Is it truly so much harder to construct a test case for quicksort than it is for bubble sort? No. The cases are EXACTLY the same. At worst you type qsort instead of bsort or whatever.

2010-11-11 Reply Admin

ideo:
Oooh, Igottanidea! Now yell at them for the bunnies, too!

I got a better idea. Put the bunnies through a bubble sort.

2010-11-12 Reply Admin

George:
I think the OP was suggesting that if you don't care about efficiency, there might be equally simple ways that are more obvious (eg iterate through array repeatedly, removing the lowest value and adding it to another array). Good? No. Easy? Yes. Easy to follow (inuitive)? Yes.

Bubble sort is pretty intuitive: Get the lowest value into the first position. Then the next lowest value into the second, then the third, etc. The language is C++, I invite you to write the code to remove the lowest value from an array, which is part of your solution.

George:
Frankly, whacking all the values into a binary tree and removing them inorder would be as little effort anyways (especially in a lanuage where wuch data structures are available).

It's C++. Go for it.

2010-11-12 Reply Admin

Ben:
sort [] = []
sort (p:xs) = sort [x | xs, x < p] ++ [p] ++ sort [x | xs, x >= p]
That's quicksort in Haskell. I mean, it's pretty trivial to memorize: you grab your first element as a pivot, then the result is the concatenation (++) of "sort everything less than pivot", "the pivot", and "sort everything greater than pivot".

It's a C++ course.

$ g++ qsort.haskell 
/usr/bin/ld:qsort.haskell: file format not recognized; treating as linker script
/usr/bin/ld:qsort.haskell:1: syntax error
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
$ mv qsort.haskell qsort.cpp
$ g++ qsort.cpp 
qsort.cpp:1: error: expected constructor, destructor, or type conversion before ‘=’ token

2010-11-14 Reply Admin

(no name):
CAPTCHA: Am I a genitus?

Depends. How many STDs have you got?

2010-11-17 Reply Admin

TRWTF is that people apparently use languages without sort in the library.

I mean, heck, even C++ has two sort routines...

2010-11-19 Reply Admin

I am stupid

2010-11-24 Reply Admin

I used to do the same..:-)

2010-12-31 Reply Admin

pshhaw... no imagination! We stored all our "forbidden" .exe files in the registry when I was at college...

2011-01-08 Reply Admin

I was working with a small team in a small department of a large company.

One day the team leader got a call from Data Security: "One of your team members has been a bad boy, and you have to discipline him. He loaded a program named pcalendar.exe onto the network."

"Well, yeah, that's the Production version of our mini-Calendar application. The Development version is named dcalendar.exe. I asked him to take a look at it."

"No, you're wrong--our database says that pcalendar.exe is a Pamela Anderson pinup calendar and we don't allow such things on our machines."

As I recall, our team leader told us that it was not trivial convincing Data Security that it was possible for two very different programs to have the same name. (I'm guessing that they weren't very sophisticated computer guys.)

2011-03-08 Reply Admin

now this is the first thing that made reading the comments worthwhile.

2012-02-24 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Once again, the man who has already decided what is true meets a truth that disagrees with him.
And once again, the truth loses.

That said, it is beyond me why Andy didn't just delete the .exe files and keep the source in the network folder. Or is this one of those wacky places that grades only on the finished executables?

Well I can report something almost similar - a friend of mine chose to repeat his college term from anew once we hit the 3rd semester (his grades obviously weren't that great). Since he had some problems with programming and one of the subjects was "programming in C++" .. i stealthily wrote him the program - some graphics program that resembled one of those television-test-screens you may know or not (basically some coloured rectangles over a regular grid and on top of it was a combined clock consising of the time both displayed digitally and graphically (using arrows). Later before he submitted that work his professor came up with a new task (obviously meant for a new program) but by lack of communication I came under the impression that it was meant as an added feature for the graphics-test-screen program i wrote him before. This time it should be an editor for simple text files. Now since I had bolstered up the test-screen-app with assembler code to speed up the graphics display (it was 1995 and our computers in the labs were still 33 MHz 486's) I addapted the assembler lib to work in both 320x200 mode (256 colours for the test screen) and also in 640x400 mode (16 colours for the text editor) then wrote some quick functions to draw a basic window-system and implemented the editor using those windows. I even circumvented the problem that the found charset in the graphics card didnt have german special letters (simply by drawing them consisting of the base letter and the dots to get ä ö ü and so on) Then came time to submit the work - and the professor obviosuly knew right away that it wasnt the work of my friend. He insisted on telling him who wrote it - and my friend replied he was by using some book (i hinted him to tell that coz I had used that book for the assembler code lib)- then he got his C coz he couldn't anwer any real questions about the program (even though I had given him instructions assuming which questions the professor would ask - I was right on the point .. but he couldn't remember the answers) and was quite happy.

Mind to say - it was the same professor that found me playing doom I during his lessons - he shook his head but didnt say a thing (i think i caught up to the lesson in the second part of the lesson in less than 5 minutes (for he needed 60 minutes to get there with the rest of my co-students) - he would never shake his head again if I played in one of his lessons - I got A grades in all of his subjects

2012-06-18 Reply Admin

I once had a similar story, only it was my math teacher interfering with my IT teacher's assignments (yes, we learned MATH instead of calculus and were using the facilities of a PC to calculate our stuff). The Math teacher found executables called "Trains.exe" and "Camerea.exe" on my drive and said that he'll have them removed as they must belong to some game. However, I don't take that sort of BS like the "roll-over-and-play-dead" hero in the story. I told him - even though he tried to interrupt - that he can remove them, but if he does I'll sue him based on several laws, including computer sabotage and data protection laws. He shut up after that and actually went to talk to the other professor. He actually apologized three days later.

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