• RFox (unregistered)

    That was the frist Amiga screen shot program ever

  • Rodnas (unregistered)

    I hope the programmer wasn't the famous Dutch programmer John "Dr. J" Vanderaart.

  • (cs)

    The Daily Happy Ending, where is my WTF??? Every second programmer does write to file byte by byte at least once at some point in their career.

  • realtebo (unregistered) in reply to balazs

    Yes, I do too, but I wasn't so brave to realease the code as is...

  • (cs)

    "Scourged"? Really

    tr.v. scourged, scourg·ing, scourg·es

    1. To afflict with severe or widespread suffering and devastation; ravage.
    2. To chastise severely; excoriate.
    3. To flog.

    I think you may have meant "scoured".

    But then again, when used in the context of:

    "Mike scourged the Amiga forums on BBS for open-source screenshot toolkits."

    It does kinda make sense, albeit in a totally wrong way for this story.

    Addendum (2014-06-19 07:03): In light about what others have said about unecesarily trashing Dr John, maybe "scoured" IS the right word.

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to OzPeter
    OzPeter:
    "Scourged"? Really

    tr.v. scourged, scourg·ing, scourg·es

    1. To afflict with severe or widespread suffering and devastation; ravage.
    2. To chastise severely; excoriate.
    3. To flog.

    I think you may have meant "scoured".

    But then again, when used in the context of:

    "Mike scourged the Amiga forums on BBS for open-source screenshot toolkits."

    It does kinda make sense, albeit in a totally wrong way for this story.

    Well at least he didn't pour over it this time.

  • nobulate (unregistered)

    This was a nice story, even if it has a happy ending!

    +vote for more tales from the BBS!

  • Stephen (unregistered) in reply to balazs
    balazs:
    The Daily Happy Ending, where is my WTF??? Every second programmer does write to file byte by byte at least once at some point in their career.
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to Stephen
    Stephen:
    balazs:
    The Daily Happy Ending, where is my WTF??? Every second programmer does write to file byte by byte at least once at some point in their career.
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
    I'm afraid I have to agree there.

    Was that actually the turning-point in Dr. John's career? I remember him (by reputation) well.

  • (cs) in reply to Stephen
    Stephen:
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
    Yup. My first thought was: things haven't changed that much, have they?
  • Versus (unregistered)

    Once again, the tale of code heroes defeating the bad guy who wanted to do something and share it with others even though it may not have been his primary skillset. Standard TDWTF article intended at an audience of "oh, we are so much better than you will ever be".

  • GWO (unregistered)

    And the WTF here is that Mike got something for free -- something he admitted he couldn't get round to himself -- then made some improvements, and then felt like that entitled him to act like a dick to the person who gave it to him in the first place.

    Mike is TRWTF.

  • (cs)

    Sadly a CS degree still isn't a guarantee that the holder can program his/her way out of a wet cardboard box.

    In my current master programs there's a guy who doesn't anything about programming (he didn't know what a variable or loop was) despite having completed a CS bachelor degree at a foreign university. He lifted on others for the group labs and projects, and was allowed to pass them despite nearly every partner protesting that he didn't contribute.

    For his thesis he "designed" a system for a business. It's something a first year student would've done better. He got the minimal passing grade.

    It's so sad, as it greatly devaluates the ~80% of graduates who actually are decent or better programmers.

  • (cs)
    ...and he even reverse-engineered parts of the AmigaOS to find programming shortcuts.
    People like these should be taken out and shot.

    Sure, I've reverse engineered the Amiga kernel as well, and it's both instructive and interesting. You can see from the machine code that Exec was written in assembler, but things like Intuition in C.

    However, it's the people that mess around with the ROM directly that caused bugware to stop working once the move from 1.2 to 1.3 was made. "What do you mean, I cannot jump directly into the ROM?" Even though the practice was explicitly discouraged by Commodore, and well-written APIs provided so you didn't have to.

  • np (unregistered) in reply to GWO
    GWO:
    And the WTF here is that Mike got something for free -- something he admitted he couldn't get round to himself -- then made some improvements, and then felt like that entitled him to act like a dick to the person who gave it to him in the first place.

    Mike is TRWTF.

    I also agree with this. Express more gratitude and be humble in your approach, even if you are a jerk at heart, Mike.

    So what if Dr John puts his years experience and qualifications on all his toolkits that he seems to be freely giving away.

  • EuroGuy (unregistered)

    What a hero Mike is!

    So he finds some code online (was that the term already used in days of BBS?) for free, to do something he couldn't be bothered to develop himself. He consequently decides it is good enough to be included in his next release. And then when he makes a trivial (albeit critical) improvement, he thinks he has the right to publicly trash the reputation of a person who he doesn't even know personally?

    Where I come from we would call Mike an arrogant bastard.

    Captcha: this story makes me very tristique

  • Zathras (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that Mike was able to integrate the toolkit into the program without noticing that anything was amiss with it, and then ignored the bug in testing.

    Way to go, Mike. At least it wasn't malware.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to Zathras

    Yeah, he didn't just fail to notice a bug, he observed the effects of a bug, which were terrible, and did nothing about it until people complained. He then, as others said, made a minor modification to a program he couldn't figure out how to write himself, and then lambasted the original author. He's kind of an asshole.

  • html nazi (unregistered) in reply to dtech
    dtech:
    In my current master programs there's a guy who doesn't anything about programming...
    I think you accidentally a word there.

    CAPTCHA: abigo

  • lol (unregistered) in reply to anon

    except Mike then released Dr John's free code in his shareware program, so adding injury to insult.

    I guess Mike must have spent his time at university doing a MBA: take free stuff, profit from it and then call anyone who had the skill to enable you to do all this a loser.

  • TroelsL (unregistered)

    So says Dr. John spent more than 5 minutes on this toolkit? Maybe it was a sample never meant for public consumption.

    I consider myself a good programmer, but every single line of code I write is not optimized to perfection, especially if it is something I whip together to solve a specific problem I probably won't have to deal with again.

    From the sound of this story, it doesn't really sound like the toolkit was really 'released' as such, and since it was apparently open source, I think Mike is a gigantic douche for insulting Dr. John on this.

    "I'll just use all the work you put into this, and modify it slightly. You are an idiot because I can make it run faster now that I have the code available to me."

  • MrOli (unregistered)

    I hope by "Open Source", they mean the MIT or BSD license and not GPL, because otherwise incorporating GPL software in to your closed source code and releasing it without source is fairly illegal. GPL is also partially incompatible with Shareware, in that you can charge a distribution fee but no ongoing fees - so as long as one person payed you to give it to them, the can redistribute it at no cost.

    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee

  • Rupee Everet (unregistered) in reply to MrOli
    MrOli:
    I hope by "Open Source", they mean the MIT or BSD license and not GPL, because otherwise incorporating GPL software in to your closed source code and releasing it without source is fairly illegal. GPL is also partially incompatible with Shareware, in that you can charge a distribution fee but no ongoing fees - so as long as one person payed you to give it to them, the can redistribute it at no cost.

    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee

    Ah the GPL argument, The programmer's equivalent to Godwin's law.

  • LivingForASolution (unregistered) in reply to GWO

    ^^This

  • (cs)

    I like this story. Seeming honest and true.

  • MonkeyCoder (unregistered) in reply to Stephen
    Stephen:
    balazs:
    The Daily Happy Ending, where is my WTF??? Every second programmer does write to file byte by byte at least once at some point in their career.
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
    Hear, hear!
  • Jim the Tool (unregistered) in reply to MrOli

    Eh, at the time the term open source didn't even exist. It only came into existence in 1998 or later. While those licenses did all exist in the late 1980s (I think), when "open source" is written here, it probably means "source is available, and no restrictions are written (but also no explicit permission is given either)" or something like that. Which, today would mean that the whole lot would be copyrighted without any permission to be used. But at that time... I don't know.

    captcha conventio: it was the conventio of the time to `steal' other peoples source code and then slag them off about it.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered)

    It could have been worse. At least he didn't close and re-open the file after every pixel!

    I'm going to guess that if it was written in C, it did NOT use the standard library FILE* type, because that buffers output by default. From the way this sounds, he probably did an OS-level write call for each pixel.

    But even that shouldn't have been a problem if the OS was doing half-decent buffering. Rewriting an entire sector because one byte was written to an open file sounds pretty stupid, even if you're worried about the possibility that a user can hit a manual eject button at any moment. But what do I know, I was using Macintosh at the time. Maybe he called a sync/flush function after every pixel, too.

    On the other hand, I'm not surprised that a PhD in CS would be too ivory towered to comprehend the concept of how long I/O requests take to finish. As the saying goes, Piled Higher and Deeper.

  • (cs) in reply to TGV
    TGV:
    Stephen:
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
    Yup. My first thought was: things haven't changed that much, have they?
    Indeed. The best response is to ASK Dr. John WHY he did a bit-by-bit write to disk, and let things progress naturally. I find it unlikely that this method was done for a good reason, but it might still be a learning experience-- at least for Dr. John.
  • Anon (unregistered)

    I'll add to the chorus of WTF Mike? You take somebody else's code that they put out there for free. Don't bother to fix the obvious problem that you observed but were too lazy to investigate. Ship it. Get complaints. Finally drag your ass around to fixing the code you copy / pasted from the BBS. Then you go an insult the guy you got the code from for no reason?

    It's a great to say "here, I've made a minor change that improves your code", you don't have to put "you're a fucking idiot" on the end of it.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Was it that "Dr. John"?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._John

  • This isn't a WTF. This is just someone being nasty and hurtful. (unregistered)

    I'm appalled.

    You'd write a message saying something like "Thanks Doc, really great stuff, but I noticed you could do it a better way, and here are the details...".

    Publically humiliating someone who did 99% of the work for you, just because you had to correct the 1%, makes Mike a total fucking nobhead. Seriously.

    The real WTF is that you decided to publish a story where the only content is some asshole bragging about how he simultaneously ripped-off AND trolled someone vastly better than he'd ever be.

    Shame on you.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    TRWTF is the Commodore Amiga right?

    Atari ST FTW!

  • eVil (unregistered)

    It has come to a pretty pass when I actually find my real job more of an entertaining distraction than reading the articles here.

    Quality hasn't just taken a nosedive, it has simply ceased to be. The hero's of the stories are alternate between angry idiots, arrogant trolls and lazy cunts. The embellishments only make the stories less readable / less believable.

    I seriously urge you to look at how you operated 8 years ago, and try to recreate that. Otherwise you're gonna have month after month of people ripping on your editorial style, and content-less bullshit, as you slide towards an inevitable demise.

    Sorry I don't mean to be rude, but I've had at least a year of patience waiting for a decent story to come along, but the only ones that ever do are old, recycled ones. Maybe I'll stop by again in a year, just in case you have reversed this trend.

    I seriously hope you manage it, because this place used to be bloody brilliant.

    Cheers

  • (cs) in reply to dtech
    dtech:
    Sadly a CS degree still isn't a guarantee that the holder can program his/her way out of a wet cardboard box.

    In my current master programs there's a guy who doesn't anything about programming (he didn't know what a variable or loop was) despite having completed a CS bachelor degree at a foreign university.

    This happens in other fields as well.

    For example, I participate in one trumpet players' forum where a student told us about another performance major who was incapable of playing above the staff... that being a G (concert pitch F) an octave and a fifth above middle C. Mind you, mastering the basic repertoire requires range to the C (concert B flat) above that, and this is within the reach of the average high schooler. This trumpeter was allowed to pass his public recital performing Haydn's Trumpet Concerto down an octave (or more; I'm not certain now). This Concerto, written for a natural trumpet, does go to the E above that C in two spots, if I recall... but this is a person intending to play professionally. It's really worse than a programmer not knowing how to write buffered I/O. Incidentally, I played it in high school as written-- and I certainly would not characterize my playing as professional quality at that time.

  • Hannes (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    TRWTF is the Commodore Amiga right?

    Atari ST FTW!

    Lol, spoken like a true idiot. :P

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to Jim the Tool
    Jim the Tool:
    Eh, at the time the term open source didn't even exist. It only came into existence in 1998 or later.

    More like 1990, that's about when the BSD and GPL licenses were created. Prior to this we just called everything public domain. Most of the Amiga software I remember was like this... either public domain, shareware or commercial. Linux was the first piece of software I encountered with the GPL license, and I don't really remember much discussion about licenses prior to that.

    The early stuff from magazines and books we typed in was all called public domain.

    The Amiga came out in 1984, was fairly popular when the A500 came out in 1987 and died by 1994 when Commodore declared bankruptcy. So there could be some overlap here.

  • (cs)

    I'm inclined to think that this story was not meant to be taken literally. Kind of like the guy who seeks out old programmers in dives in Curacao and asks them why they used a loop five years ago.

  • Xaser (unregistered)

    As much as I want to join the "WTF John?" crew too, I do have to naturally wonder how much of the story as presented actually happened. Given Erik's history of pulling stuff out of thin air, I wouldn't be surprised if the "letter" at the end is apocryphal.

    CAPTCHA: erat. I smell erat.

    (That totally works in some accents.)

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to Stephen
    Stephen:
    balazs:
    The Daily Happy Ending, where is my WTF??? Every second programmer does write to file byte by byte at least once at some point in their career.
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
    Ya'know -- Open source.
  • Bill Gwinkelt (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    This trumpeter was allowed to pass his public recital performing Haydn's Trumpet Concerto down an octave (or more; I'm not certain now).
    I read that as "pubic rectal performing".
  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    this place used to be bloody brillant.
    There FTFY.
  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    It has come to a pretty pass when I actually find my real job more of an entertaining distraction than reading the articles here.

    Quality hasn't just taken a nosedive, it has simply ceased to be. The hero's of the stories are alternate between angry idiots, arrogant trolls and lazy cunts. The embellishments only make the stories less readable / less believable.

    I seriously urge you to look at how you operated 8 years ago, and try to recreate that. Otherwise you're gonna have month after month of people ripping on your editorial style, and content-less bullshit, as you slide towards an inevitable demise.

    Sorry I don't mean to be rude, but I've had at least a year of patience waiting for a decent story to come along, but the only ones that ever do are old, recycled ones. Maybe I'll stop by again in a year, just in case you have reversed this trend.

    I seriously hope you manage it, because this place used to be bloody brilliant.

    Cheers

    The high point for me was MFD. Not because it was any good. It wasn't. It was absolutely terrible. But the comments were hilarious.

    Seriously, bring back MFD and have your users write your content for you.

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to LivingForASolution
    LivingForASolution:
    ^^This
    Which?

    I would like to take your comment seriously; but given that you have failed to master commonly mistaken Reply/Quote semantics I must question your upbringing.

  • Ziplodocus (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    TGV:
    Stephen:
    The real WTF was the insult in the BBS post questioning Dr John's credentials. Unnecessary, inflamatory, insulting.
    Yup. My first thought was: things haven't changed that much, have they?
    Indeed. The best response is to follow the empty glasses of beer to ASK Dr. John WHY he did a bit-by-bit write to disk, and run a hundred-euro tab in a place you'd never like to see again. I find it unlikely that this method would have anything to do with windmills, but it might still be a learning experience-- at least for Sergio.

    FTFY

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    I'll add to the chorus of WTF Mike? You take somebody else's code that they put out there for free. Don't bother to fix the obvious problem that you observed but were too lazy to investigate. Ship it. Get complaints. Finally drag your ass around to fixing the code you copy / pasted from the BBS. Then you go an insult the guy you got the code from for no reason?

    It's a great to say "here, I've made a minor change that improves your code", you don't have to put "you're a fucking idiot" on the end of it.

    reminds me of this: https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/

    Specifically this part:

    And that’s just it: you can’t judge code without talking to its author. You can’t judge it without knowing the constraints it was written under, knowing whether it even solves the intended problem, how expensive it was to create, what knock-on effects it had on systems that depend on it. Without context, it’s not a program, it’s just text, and at best you can say whether it agrees with your pet style guide.
  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Was it that "Dr. John"?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._John

    Well, he was in the right place (new software) at the wrong time (other people had passed his skills by). http://www.songlyrics.com/dr-john/right-place-wrong-time-lyrics/

  • MT (unregistered) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    I'm going to guess that if it was written in C, it did NOT use the standard library FILE* type, because that buffers output by default. From the way this sounds, he probably did an OS-level write call for each pixel.

    But even that shouldn't have been a problem if the OS was doing half-decent buffering.

    The C library may perform buffering (and most mainstream C runtimes today do), but as far as I am aware, the C standard does not require the standard file routines to perform buffering. I don't know specifics about the Amiga, I would not be especially surprised if C compilers from that era did not perform buffering automatically.

    I would also not be surprised if the OS did not perform much buffering. I'm pretty sure the concept of disk caches (i.e. smartdrv for DOS) was a "hot new idea" (at least in consumer OS's) around or slightly after the time period of this article.

  • Universe Man (unregistered)

    This reminds me of downloading the entire Internet to disk:

    http://www.w3schools.com/images/downloadwww.gif

  • Bert Glanstron (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    It has come to a pretty pass when I actually find my real job more of an entertaining distraction than reading the articles here.

    Quality hasn't just taken a nosedive, it has simply ceased to be. The hero's of the stories are alternate between angry idiots, arrogant trolls and lazy cunts. The embellishments only make the stories less readable / less believable.

    I seriously urge you to look at how you operated 8 years ago, and try to recreate that. Otherwise you're gonna have month after month of people ripping on your editorial style, and content-less bullshit, as you slide towards an inevitable demise.

    Sorry I don't mean to be rude, but I've had at least a year of patience waiting for a decent story to come along, but the only ones that ever do are old, recycled ones. Maybe I'll stop by again in a year, just in case you have reversed this trend.

    I seriously hope you manage it, because this place used to be bloody brilliant.

    Cheers

    Dear eVil,

    In case you can’t tell, this is a grown-up place. The fact that you insist on using your ridiculous handle clearly shows that you’re too young and too stupid to be using thedailywtf.com.

    Go away and grow up.

    Sincerely, Bert Glanstron

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