• Cmdr Bob (unregistered) in reply to dubbreak
    dubbreak:
    Knux2:
    Bill:
    This is absurd. There was no such thing as VBScript, COM, or debuggers in 1979. DOS had not even been invented yet.

    Nice try, Alex.

    I think the reference to 1979 may have been a bit of sarcasm. As in, the meeting room would have been considered aggressively modern IF it had been 1979...

    TRWTF is that Bill didn't get that.

    Too bad it wasn't 50s modern, then it would be cool. 70s decor isn't scheduled to be in vogue again for another decade or two.

    I know this is tongue and cheek, but where have you been hiding? It's already swinging back to the 70's, just without all the free love.

  • LB (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Does your company let all its employees manage whomever they feel like, even people who haven't been assigned to work in their group?

    Corey didn't hire the consultants. The suits he met with did. I very much doubt that he could just arbitrarily decide to manage people who (at least in the estimation of top management) are in a higher tier than he is.

  • Skool Daze (unregistered) in reply to Ken B.
    Ken B.:
    "they" decided to basically allow all of them on to the network and "we'll deal with a couple of infected computers later".

    ...

    So, two weeks into the semester, plenty of students still have no network access in their room.

    Sounds like they dealt with it just fine... no network access, no viruses!

  • worldhate (unregistered)

    I see mentions of source articles... How does one see those?

  • ÃÆâ€â„ (unregistered) in reply to UTR
    UTR:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Dear Bells-Torgo In case you haven't noticed, most of the users of this site are passive-aggressive and prefer to sit back and watch Rome burn so they can say I told you so. In case you can’t tell, this is a grown-up place. The It's hard to do anything when you don't have management support. fact that you insist on using consultants clearly shows that you’re too young and too stupid to be in the insurance game. Well, that and you find out real quick that if you stick your neck out it's not going to be appreciated anyway. Go away and grow up. Oh, well. Sincerely, Bert Glanstron

    Aha! I see you tried to pull a fast one on the mods there. Well played, UTR, well played... Although if I did that I would also have inserted a Darth just for fun, maybe also a Paula Bean. It's WTF's like these that make you wonder why YOU'RE not a consultant. You can get away with stuff like this and drain the IT budget of major companies.

  • ÃÆâ€â„ (unregistered) in reply to Cmdr Bob
    Cmdr Bob:
    dubbreak:
    Knux2:
    Bill:
    This is absurd. There was no such thing as VBScript, COM, or debuggers in 1979. DOS had not even been invented yet.

    Nice try, Alex.

    I think the reference to 1979 may have been a bit of sarcasm. As in, the meeting room would have been considered aggressively modern IF it had been 1979...

    TRWTF is that Bill didn't get that.

    Too bad it wasn't 50s modern, then it would be cool. 70s decor isn't scheduled to be in vogue again for another decade or two.

    I know this is tongue and cheek, but where have you been hiding? It's already swinging back to the 70's, just without all the free love.

    I thought that's why they want to legalize marijuana...

  • ÃÆâ€â„ (unregistered) in reply to asdf
    asdf:
    Has anyone noticed that you can click on it and princess pony appears on the screen?
    What I do now is check the source of the page and see if "cornify" appears anywhere in the page.
  • Henning Makholm (unregistered) in reply to worldhate
    worldhate:
    I see mentions of source articles... How does one see those?
    Depends on your browser (consult its documentation!), but often Ctrl-U, or right-click anywhere in the page and select it from the context menu. Or wget it separately and use your favorite pager. Or telnet to port 80 and type fast enough not to bore the server. Or ...
  • UTR (unregistered) in reply to ÃÆâ€â„
    ÃÆâ€â„:
    UTR:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Dear Bells-Torgo In case you haven't noticed, most of the users of this site are passive-aggressive and prefer to sit back and watch Rome burn so they can say I told you so. In case you can’t tell, this is a grown-up place. The It's hard to do anything when you don't have management support. fact that you insist on using consultants clearly shows that you’re too young and too stupid to be in the insurance game. Well, that and you find out real quick that if you stick your neck out it's not going to be appreciated anyway. Go away and grow up. Oh, well. Sincerely, Bert Glanstron

    Aha! I see you tried to pull a fast one on the mods there. Well played, UTR, well played... Although if I did that I would also have inserted a Darth just for fun, maybe also a Paula Bean. It's WTF's like these that make you wonder why YOU'RE not a consultant. You can get away with stuff like this and drain the IT budget of major companies.

    Not sure why the mods have gone into Hitler mode. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a insult or a compliment. I think they know about these "secret" messages, but they don't think I'm hurting anyone this way. At any rate, there are good consultants and bad ones. In my experience (as a long-term employee), most of those interested in employment are more like leeches than people of benefit. Thanks for your support. There should be some Darth references in other messages if you look!

  • Stuart MacDonald (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    Kull:
    Neil:
    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Because numerous programs have already been written to manage consultants... svn, tfs, cvs, Red Queen

    Awesome, I didn't know consultants could be managed through source control systems, I wish I knew about the command "svn check consultants code for wtf" or "svn make consultant smart" sooner, could have saved companies millions!

    Google does not reveal Red Queen as an SCCS. I think Kull meant this Red Queen. She was pretty good at "managing" the "consultants".

  • Stuart MacDonald (unregistered) in reply to dubbreak
    dubbreak:
    Knux2:
    Bill:
    This is absurd. There was no such thing as VBScript, COM, or debuggers in 1979. DOS had not even been invented yet.

    Nice try, Alex.

    I think the reference to 1979 may have been a bit of sarcasm. As in, the meeting room would have been considered aggressively modern IF it had been 1979...

    TRWTF is that Bill didn't get that.

    Too bad it wasn't 50s modern, then it would be cool. 70s decor isn't scheduled to be in vogue again for another decade or two.

    Are you sure?
  • (cs) in reply to UTR
    UTR:
    whiskeyjack:
    da Doctah:
    They're the same guy.

    Really.

    Have you ever seen the two of them together?

    So he's naked in Star Wars?

    I have exposed myself...pray I don't expose myself further. I could have gone my whole life without picturing that. Is that a lightsaber, or are you just happy to see me?
    Once you've pictured how Ewoks reproduce, it's no longer possible to be shocked.
  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to Ben4jammin
    Ben4jammin:
    And lastly, if you do not have the respect built up for the suits to have more confidence in you than they do the consultants, time to update the resume.
    What do the executives and vice-presidents and other "suits" bring to the enterprise?

    Is it their fine business skills? They wasted millions of the company's money, so that's possibly not the answer.

    Is it their excellent people skills? Even a stereotypical socially inept nerd still has to have "manipulating managers" as their primary job skill, so clearly we can't rely on the managers for their people skills.

    Is it their technical skill? Oh my.

    Is it their brilliant stategic vision? Yeah, I'd beleive that.

    It is technically correct to point out that a developer has to have enough people skills to manage the non-technical managers - that's the way the world is, and complaining rarely works.

    But if we have to have all the people skills and all the business skills just to be aable to apply our technical skills to the job of making money for the shareholders, it would be nice if one day some of those non-technical people would stop acting like autistic gerbils.

  • Kempeth (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    Kempeth:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Surely someone you entrust with 3.5 million doesn't have to be supervised, right?

    To be fair, the scope of the project might really have been too big to handle it with internal resources. Corey probably had enough to do as it was.

    Would you hire a builder to build you a house with all your cash and not bother to go around and check the progress and that it's coming along as you would want it?

    This is the real world :)

    FYI that first part was meant to be sarcastic...

    As for the house thing. Plenty of people do that. They generally don't know anyone who has had a house built for them or they think the horror stories they heard couldn't possibly happen to them...

  • blargh (unregistered)

    Hastur, Hastur, Hastur.

    Oh... fuck.

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to LB
    LB:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Does your company let all its employees manage whomever they feel like, even people who haven't been assigned to work in their group?

    Corey didn't hire the consultants. The suits he met with did. I very much doubt that he could just arbitrarily decide to manage people who (at least in the estimation of top management) are in a higher tier than he is.

    Yeah, I guess the only way to remain sane is to join the dark side and take all you can out of the system.
  • Dirk (unregistered) in reply to bl@h
    bl@h:
    TRWTF is that we still think outsourcing by management is worthy of a wtf.
    Did you not read the 8 minutes part?
  • Erm (unregistered) in reply to whiskeyjack
    whiskeyjack:
    da Doctah:
    They're the same guy.

    Really.

    Have you ever seen the two of them together?

    So he's naked in Star Wars?

    Finally! I didn't want to be the first to say it...

  • Bosshog (unregistered) in reply to jjtypospotter
    jjtypospotter:
    24 minutes, or 25 minutes? Which is it?
    Your hesitation has caused a catastrophic failure!
  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Hey guys, I'm back. Weren't we talking about the Hippocratic Oath or something?

  • Mordred (unregistered) in reply to Bill

    Nor web services. I didnt believe the story either from the very beginning.

  • APH (unregistered)

    Man, there was an opportunity for a Lost reference too good to pass up.

    The production server must have its clock reset to 12:00AM every 8 minutes. I suggest that you automate this.

    Change that to 108 minutes and it's "Namaste" from the Dharma initiative!

  • Spoiler alert (unregistered) in reply to APH
    APH:
    Man, there was an opportunity for a Lost reference too good to pass up.
    The production server must have its clock reset to 12:00AM every 8 minutes. I suggest that you automate this.

    Change that to 108 minutes and it's "Namaste" from the Dharma initiative!

    Turns out in the end that they actually are all dead and in purgatory, and the smoke monster was Jacob's brother trying to escape.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Spoiler alert
    Spoiler alert:
    APH:
    Man, there was an opportunity for a Lost reference too good to pass up.
    The production server must have its clock reset to 12:00AM every 8 minutes. I suggest that you automate this.

    Change that to 108 minutes and it's "Namaste" from the Dharma initiative!

    Turns out in the end that they actually are all dead and in purgatory, and the smoke monster was Jacob's brother trying to escape.

    You've badly misinterpreted it I'm afraid, but don't worry because most people did. If you watch it more closely you'll realise that Jack was the smoke monster and the whole "purgatory" thing was actually Locke's dream, a scenario that was introduced at the end of the 4th season. Also, Claire's son was the second coming of Christ but the smoke monster (Jack) killed him off-screen during season 5, so the whole "good versus evil" battle was actually won by evil, because Jack was the devil. Duh.

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    LB:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Does your company let all its employees manage whomever they feel like, even people who haven't been assigned to work in their group?

    Corey didn't hire the consultants. The suits he met with did. I very much doubt that he could just arbitrarily decide to manage people who (at least in the estimation of top management) are in a higher tier than he is.

    Yeah, I guess the only way to remain sane is to join the dark side and take all you can out of the system.

    Bingo!

    Reminds me of when I worked for a large-ish insurance company in the early '90s. The boss of the region I worked in had this grand plan of automating the quotation process with our brokers via fax. (For a bit of context, remember that these were the days of fax servers and modems, before email and e-commerce web sites became commonplace - we didn't even have externally accessible email addresses then!)

    He was set on this idea of brokers sending a fax to the insurance company's fax server, getting it converted to text via OCR, reading the property value, comparing it to a table in Excel, then faxing back a "preliminary" quote on property insurance based on the value.

    Admirable idea, yes, but full of what-ifs and exceptions: multiple employees at multiple brokers with different handwriting, different forms of request letters and different formats of recording numbers ("$100,000" vs "100000.00" vs "100,000" vs "100K", etc), different policy types and discounts that could be quoted but no means to query our mainframe-based DB for existing clients, no method to verify what area of the city the property existed at in order to quote based on the different premiums (premiums wildly differed according to location, this was before any affordable GIS mapping was available), and above all any OCR solution at the time was painfully inaccurate (is that a zero or the letter O? Comma or period? What is "$LGO.0o)"?). Oh, and the fax server at the time couldn't receive faxes and automatically route to recipients because we didn't have direct-in-dial capability (and would have cost a pretty penny to get), so we would have had to designate a body to be the "fax operator" to manually route inbound faxes.. ooh, what fun!

    Oh, and the brokers didn't want any more workload foisted off in their direction, not to mention it was way easier for them to pick up the phone and call the underwriter. Path of least resistance and all that.

    At that point it was clear that any efficiencies (if there were any) would be wiped out by manual interventions/corrections/follow-up.

    All of this was discussed at length in meetings and preliminary scope/requirements analysis, at which point IT said it's not workable nor a viable project for funding; but that didn't stop the VP from hiring the receptionist's boyfriend to try and write a VB app to do it. Needless to say it didn't go very far.

  • (cs)

    What happens if you don't run hastur.bat at exactly 26 minute intervals?

  • (cs) in reply to Eternal Density
    Eternal Density:
    What happens if you don't run hastur.bat at exactly 26 minute intervals?

    God kills a kitten...

  • db (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    Steve The Cynic:
    The clock needs to be reset to midnight every eight minutes? This concept makes my eyes bleed.

    That the so-called consultants (I wouldn't consult them for information on the colour of the sky, myself) didn't automate it makes blood gush from every bodily orifice.

    Thanks, guys.

    I'd say they used a manual reset from a terminal by putting in a string of digits - code reuse from a old project on an island somewhere.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to db
    db:
    Steve The Cynic:
    The clock needs to be reset to midnight every eight minutes? This concept makes my eyes bleed.

    That the so-called consultants (I wouldn't consult them for information on the colour of the sky, myself) didn't automate it makes blood gush from every bodily orifice.

    Thanks, guys.

    I'd say they used a manual reset from a terminal by putting in a string of digits - code reuse from a old project on an island somewhere.

    A manual reset? That's ridiculous, you'd need to get some poor schmuck to sit in there all day long just to enter the numbers. Nobody would be that stupid...

  • PS (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic
    The clock needs to be reset to midnight every eight minutes? This concept makes my eyes bleed.

    Speaking of that, if your clock resets every 8 minutes, how exactly do you schedule a job to run every 25 minutes?

  • kastein (unregistered) in reply to PS
    PS:
    The clock needs to be reset to midnight every eight minutes? This concept makes my eyes bleed.

    Speaking of that, if your clock resets every 8 minutes, how exactly do you schedule a job to run every 25 minutes?

    You have two global variables you use to determine how many times the clock has been reset. One is named "clockhasbeenresetonce" and the other one is named "do_not_use4". A WSH script reads some environment variables and uses a named pipe to communicate with the process scheduling the 25-minute job to tell it to set the two variables to match the environment variables; the 25 minute job scheduling tool periodically reads the global variables and determines whether it should run the job (one minute after every 3rd clock reset) or not.

    5 points and a rainbow kitten to anyone who can figure out what the bug is.

    hint: the job only runs every 25 minutes for the first iteration, after that it's every 24 minutes.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Bill
    Bill:
    This is absurd. There was no such thing as VBScript, COM, or debuggers in 1979.

    That's just what the Illuminati want you to believe ...

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    Kull:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Because numerous programs have already been written to manage consultants... svn, tfs, cvs, Red Queen

    Awesome, I didn't know consultants could be managed through source control systems, I wish I knew about the command "svn check consultants code for wtf" or "svn make consultant smart" sooner, could have saved companies millions!

    Well, you see, that's what you miss out on when you don't read the documentation.

    Apparently you are also unaware of the "svn read the documentation for me" command.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Upper management decided that Corey was not qualified to do the job, so they hired consultants to do it instead. Would you really expect that they would then put Corey in charge of the consultants? Or are you supposing that he could just declare himself in charge and the consultants would follow his orders?

    Likewise, as to the first part, if management has decided to bring in these consultants to implement this, I can't imagine that they would allow Corey to just throw away what the consultants produced and substitute his own solution. If they trusted him to do that, they would never have brought in the consultants to begin with.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    This story again reminds me that there are two types of software developers in the world. One is the "dedicated" kind: They see a problem, think of a possible solution, note that it is very complicated and difficult, and so they dig in and get to work implementing this complicated solution. The second are the "smart", also known as "lazy", kind: They see a problem, think of a possible solution, not that is very complicated and difficult, and so they step back and look for a cleaner, simpler solution before they waste a lot of time.

  • Poutines (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Upper management decided that Corey was not qualified to do the job, so they hired consultants to do it instead. Would you really expect that they would then put Corey in charge of the consultants? Or are you supposing that he could just declare himself in charge and the consultants would follow his orders?

    Likewise, as to the first part, if management has decided to bring in these consultants to implement this, I can't imagine that they would allow Corey to just throw away what the consultants produced and substitute his own solution. If they trusted him to do that, they would never have brought in the consultants to begin with.

    If he was that incompetent, management would have recognized him as one of their own and immediately promoted him to Executive Vice President of External Resource Management. Then Corey could have done what every other manager does and throw out months of work on a whim and redid it his way.

  • VJ (unregistered)

    "He discovered that a key config file was encrypted with a key no one had anymore, and so recreated it through trial and error."

    WTF?? The encryption was probably crap, since he managed to break in only 3 months

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Because the only reason they talked to Corey was because it was his idea. Management already developed a management plan: budget, resources, etc. I was actually surprised management bothered to talk to him at all.

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to Poutines
    Poutines:
    Jay:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Upper management decided that Corey was not qualified to do the job, so they hired consultants to do it instead. Would you really expect that they would then put Corey in charge of the consultants? Or are you supposing that he could just declare himself in charge and the consultants would follow his orders?

    Likewise, as to the first part, if management has decided to bring in these consultants to implement this, I can't imagine that they would allow Corey to just throw away what the consultants produced and substitute his own solution. If they trusted him to do that, they would never have brought in the consultants to begin with.

    If he was that incompetent, management would have recognized him as one of their own and immediately promoted him to Executive Vice President of External Resource Management. Then Corey could have done what every other manager does and throw out months of work on a whim and redid it his way.

    Obviously he was/is competent, which is why they don't trust him: They don't understand him and fear that.

  • Guest (unregistered) in reply to Chewbacca

    I have worked on similar projects and the reason why the formulaes need to be on the sheet is because sometimes the users want to make changes to the data and don't want to create the report again or in other cases, they want to try things out by changing data and see the results ..

  • BG (unregistered) in reply to UTR

    Accidentally highlighted your message and found the hidden gem. Hilarious!

  • BG (unregistered) in reply to UTR
    UTR:
    Neil:
    Why didn't Corey write a program to do the import himself?

    Or manage the consultants when they came in to make sure they don't make a mess?

    Dear Bells-Torgo In case you haven't noticed, most of the users of this site are passive-aggressive and prefer to sit back and watch Rome burn so they can say I told you so. In case you can’t tell, this is a grown-up place. The It's hard to do anything when you don't have management support. fact that you insist on using consultants clearly shows that you’re too young and too stupid to be in the insurance game. Well, that and you find out real quick that if you stick your neck out it's not going to be appreciated anyway. Go away and grow up. Oh, well. Sincerely, Bert Glanstron

    Oops. Accidentally highlighted your message and found the hidden gem. Hilarious!

  • mh (unregistered)

    Anyone questioning this has obviously never worked with consultants or had to deal with management.

    The brief summary goes like this: "I am management. I am god. Who is this little person? This little person cannot possibly know more about something than I do. I must reject his suggestion, if I do not understand it that means it must be wrong. I am management. Spending lots of money makes me feel important. Especially if it's not my own. Who is this person in a suit? His words are impressive, I like the cut of his jib! Here person-in-a-suit, have lots of money that isn't my own. I am management. Mmmmmmmm."

  • radix (unregistered) in reply to Alargule

    yeah, well, after hastur.bat has been called three times... what does happen then?

    O_o ;)

  • Martian Kyo (unregistered) in reply to Alargule

    pretty sure it's supposed to be an 'm' not a 'h'

  • Martian Kyo (double posting) (unregistered) in reply to Alargule
    Alargule:
    ...hastur.bat...

    Wait...what?

    I am pretty sure it's meant to be an 'm' not a 'h'. It would also explain the frequent run times.

  • (cs)
    hastur.bat needed to run every 24 minutes (emphatically not every 30, or every 15- anything other than 25 minutes caused catastrophic failures)

    So was it 24, or 25? This is vital information.

    You don't want to accidentally run hastur.bat a minute too early, or too late. After the third time, Hastur might well--

  • Shawn (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Pretty sure timias understood that. If you were keeping up, you'd have seen the comment was just about the believability factor.

    I know it's been more than a year, but somebody had to set that straight.

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