The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

chubertdev · 2014-07-03 Reply Admin

meouit:
Apparently there's a large chunk of people who think it's the weapons that make a family friendly environmnet.

Well, an armed society is a polite society.

2014-07-03 Reply Admin

Erik Gern:
someguy:
Wow, such a long, rambling post for such a short WTF. Did Erik Gern log in on snoofle's account?

No I didn't. Now shut up or I'll write Hanzo article.

God, no! Do that and someone else will hunt you down and force you to use only Discourse for the rest of your wretched life!

Glad to get back to CS again.

2014-07-03 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
meouit:
Apparently there's a large chunk of people who think it's the weapons that make a family friendly environmnet.

Well, an armed society is a polite society.

Hmmm, just look at the history of the American West for a contradiction of that piece of BS.

2014-07-03 Reply Admin

Flash:
"she picked up the phone, pressed the receiver a couple of times"
You don't press the receiver. The receiver is the thing you speak into. You flash the hook. (That made a clicking noise on the line that would get the attention of the operator.)

This article gets a very high score in the I-don't-know-the-terminology competition.

CONGRATUATIONS!@! you win the pedantic ass of the day award. Pick up your free nose clippers at reception.

2014-07-03 Reply Admin

Loose Bree:
-.-:
"Stefan went in search of an assault rifle and a plane ticket..."
How would you get an assault rifle on a plane?
Easy, you disassemble the weapon into pieces, attach a note to each piece describing its arrangement within the original weapon, then package each piece+note in a separate luggage item. Just be ready to send duplicates if any piece is lost during the flight.

No, that's the hard way.

The easy way is to use TCP which will automatically disassemble the weapon into pieces, attach a note to each piece describing its arrangement within the original weapon, and send duplicates of any piece that gets lost in transit.

Also, http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/clippers.asp

2014-07-04 Reply Admin

Huh? TCP and UDP are both at the transport layer?!

In terms of the OSI model, yes, in terms of programming no.

UDP you have to worry about path MTU, packet sequencing, dropped packets, etc.

TCP just gives you a pipe you can read from or write to, and it handles the nitty gritty like re-ordering packets, requesting retries, etc.

Matt Westwood · 2014-07-04 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
Loose Bree:
-.-:
"Stefan went in search of an assault rifle and a plane ticket..."
How would you get an assault rifle on a plane?
Easy, you disassemble the weapon into pieces, attach a note to each piece describing its arrangement within the original weapon, then package each piece+note in a separate luggage item. Just be ready to send duplicates if any piece is lost during the flight.
No, that's the hard way.

The easy way is to use TCP which will automatically disassemble the weapon into pieces, attach a note to each piece describing its arrangement within the original weapon, and send duplicates of any piece that gets lost in transit.

Also, http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/clippers.asp

.... all you need is a 3d printer and you're away.

Sure we're not far off the technology that will automatically machine a piece of metal into whatever form you want -- you just need a moderately-well equipped workshop such as can be found in e.g. educational institutions. Can't see where the barriers are.

Steve The Cynic · 2014-07-04 Reply Admin

jkupski:
What I learned from this article is that UDP was invented to replace operators on the PSTN,

Possibly because someone (wanted us to think that he) thought that the "P" in "P(ublic) S(witched) T(elephone) N(etwork)" stands for "Packet". It doesn't.

And of course if you look closely at the history of the Internet (and of internets in general - I know the difference, thanks), you discover that they invented TCP (and IP as we know it) after inventing the first internets, but "The" Internet was a result of what followed.

Or maybe the whole thing was an elaborate hoax that caused major cognitive dissonance - you know, that thing they call a joke...

Steve The Cynic · 2014-07-04 Reply Admin

Stuart Longland:
Huh? TCP and UDP are both at the transport layer?!

In terms of the OSI model, yes, in terms of programming no.

UDP you have to worry about path MTU, packet sequencing, dropped packets, etc.

TCP just gives you a pipe you can read from or write to, and it handles the nitty gritty like re-ordering packets, requesting retries, etc.

Pff. They are both transport protocols. They are specifically designed to offer different behaviour guarantees:

TCP offers guaranteed in-order delivery without missing or duplicate data, on a octet-stream basis. (This is important. Lots of people[citation needed] think TCP delivers packets for the programmer. This is a serious mistake. TCP delivers bytes, in order, once and once only.)
UDP offers "best effort" (i.e. not much effort at all) delivery of packets of data, with no guarantees in terms of what order packets are delivered, whether they are delivered multiple times, or even at all. In exchange for giving up the guaranteed in-order once-and-once-only delivery, you get reduced latency in the face of packet loss - delivery of subsequent UDP packets is not delayed by loss of earlier ones.

If I want to shove 40KB into a single UDP packet, I can, and if the path has a bigger MTU, it will be delivered in one IP packet just like a 400-byte UDP packet would be. More likely, my 40KB packet will be fragmented by the IP layer, and reassembled on delivery, but that's not my problem.

UDP is just fine for transporting real-time media packets like VoIP and streaming-video, where losing, duplicating, or misordering a packet is unfortunate but recoverable, but delaying a packet while we recover from the loss of an earlier packet is a major no-no. The key is in that word "transporting". UDP is a transport protocol just like TCP is.

No, of course it isn't valid to use UDP when doing a reliable-transport job. But it isn't valid to use TCP when you are transporting delay-sensitive loss-tolerant data. Because we have both sorts of data flows to accommodate, it is awesome that we have both transport protocols available.

EDIT: And the programming effort in using these protocols fortheirintendedjob* is more or less equal.

2014-07-04 Reply Admin

CodeMonkey:
Ike:
Al Gore did NOT invent the Internet. He invented something more fundamental: The Al Gore-rithm.

Impossible. Al Gore is a middle aged white man and everyone knows they don't have -rithm.

That's why he had to invent his own equivalent.

2014-07-04 Reply Admin

Stefan should have appreciated the immediate performance gain that resulted from the coding decision...

2014-07-04 Reply Admin

-.-:
"Stefan went in search of an assault rifle and a plane ticket..."
How would you get an assault rifle on a plane?

I just carried my M4 with a chamber guard when we were flying to Kuwait en route to Iraq. We put our rifles under the seats in front of us. It was a flight specifically chartered for troop movements; it might be a bit more involved if you're flying commercially.

2014-07-05 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
.... all you need is a 3d printer and you're away.
Sure we're not far off the technology that will automatically machine a piece of metal into whatever form you want -- you just need a moderately-well equipped workshop such as can be found in e.g. educational institutions. Can't see where the barriers are.

Soon there will be no barriers.

I tried to Google for an old joke but can't find it. In the days when Xerox machines only copied paper documents, someone made a joke press release where Xerox announced a machine that would copy solid objects. A questioner asked what would happen to Xerox after someone buys two of them and uses one to make copies of the other. The Xerox employee called off the press conference.

Well, it used to be a joke.

Now all we have to do is figure out which 3D printer company is going to be most successful, and short its shares.

2014-07-05 Reply Admin

Pff. They are both transport protocols. They are specifically designed to offer different behaviour guarantees: * TCP offers guaranteed in-order delivery without missing or duplicate data, on a octet-stream basis. (This is important. Lots of people[citation needed] think TCP delivers packets for the programmer. This is a serious mistake. TCP delivers bytes, in order, once and once only.) * UDP offers "best effort" (i.e. not much effort at all) delivery of packets of data, with no guarantees in terms of what order packets are delivered, whether they are delivered multiple times, or even at all. In exchange for giving up the guaranteed in-order once-and-once-only delivery, you get reduced latency in the face of packet loss - delivery of subsequent UDP packets is not delayed by loss of earlier ones.
If I want to shove 40KB into a single UDP packet, I can, and if the path has a bigger MTU, it will be delivered in one IP packet just like a 400-byte UDP packet would be. More likely, my 40KB packet will be fragmented by the IP layer, and reassembled on delivery, but that's not my problem.

UDP is just fine for transporting real-time media packets like VoIP and streaming-video, where losing, duplicating, or misordering a packet is unfortunate but recoverable, but delaying a packet while we recover from the loss of an earlier packet is a major no-no. The key is in that word "transporting". UDP is a transport protocol just like TCP is.

Ahh, I didn't say one was any better or worse than the other, just agreed with the author's statement that UDP was lower level from a programming standpoint.

UDP has fewer overheads than TCP, which is why it gets used for streaming real-time data. If a packet in an audio stream gets lost you don't have time to re-send the data, so forget about it and move on.

TCP will try to re-send that missed piece of data, thus cause your station to slip behind. UDP: if it's a problem you implement forward erasure coding or a packet re-send request system to deal with it. It's up to you to deal with it.

2014-07-05 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Well, an armed society is a polite society.

What do you have against soccer players? It's usually hockey players who are singled out for being impolite (to put it mildly).

2014-07-07 Reply Admin

meouit:
Ziplodocus:
-.-:
"Stefan went in search of an assault rifle and a plane ticket..."
How would you get an assault rifle on a plane?

Do they even let you an a plane in 'Murica without an assault weapon? Surely anyone without one is a foreigner, therefore a terrorist.
Yes, I was amused by the furore that Target caused by requesting (not insisting) that in keeping with their family friendly image, weapons not be brought into the store.

Apparently there's a large chunk of people who think it's the weapons that make a family friendly environment.

"An armed society is a polite society."

2014-07-07 Reply Admin

meouit:
Ziplodocus:
-.-:
"Stefan went in search of an assault rifle and a plane ticket..."
How would you get an assault rifle on a plane?

Do they even let you an a plane in 'Murica without an assault weapon? Surely anyone without one is a foreigner, therefore a terrorist.
Yes, I was amused by the furore that Target caused by requesting (not insisting) that in keeping with their family friendly image, weapons not be brought into the store.

Apparently there's a large chunk of people who think it's the weapons that make a family friendly environment.

"An armed society is a polite society."

2014-07-07 Reply Admin

Friedrice The Great:
chubertdev:

Well, an armed society is a polite society.
Hmmm, just look at the history of the American West for a contradiction of that piece of BS.

It would be more useful to look at the real history of the American West rather than the Hollywood version. I've seen several studies that found that the murder rate in the "old West" was lower than that in most American cities today.

Sure, if you watch Hollywood Westerns you might get the idea that bandit gangs would terrorize towns all the time and people were regularly shooting each other in the streets. But if you watch Hollywood crime shows, you'd think the same thing happens in Detroit or Washington DC today. Well, okay, bad example ...

2014-07-07 Reply Admin

Ziplodocus:
-.-:
"Stefan went in search of an assault rifle and a plane ticket..."
How would you get an assault rifle on a plane?

Do they even let you an a plane in 'Murica without an assault weapon? Surely anyone without one is a foreigner, therefore a terrorist.

Number of terrorist attacks stopped to date by the TSA: zero.

Number of terrorist attacks stopped to date by unarmed people on a plane wrestling the terrorists into submission: At least four.

Thus, here's my idea of how to improve airplane security: As each passenger goes through screening, check if he or she is carrying a weapon. If not, give him one. If everyone on the plane is armed to the teeth, how could any terrorist hope to pull off a hijacking? Instead, our security system guarantees that the ONLY people on an airplane who are armed will be the terrorists, and so they can be 100% confidant that no one will be in a position to fight them.

chubertdev · 2014-07-07 Reply Admin

Jay:
Friedrice The Great:
chubertdev:

Well, an armed society is a polite society.
Hmmm, just look at the history of the American West for a contradiction of that piece of BS.

It would be more useful to look at the real history of the American West rather than the Hollywood version. I've seen several studies that found that the murder rate in the "old West" was lower than that in most American cities today.

Sure, if you watch Hollywood Westerns you might get the idea that bandit gangs would terrorize towns all the time and people were regularly shooting each other in the streets. But if you watch Hollywood crime shows, you'd think the same thing happens in Detroit or Washington DC today. Well, okay, bad example ...

+1

Gun violence is the worst in the American cities with strictest gun laws, like Chicago and DC.

jasmine2501 · 2014-07-07 Reply Admin

They won't even let you take AR-15s on a plane, and assault rifles are much better weapons than the AR-15.

jasmine2501 · 2014-07-07 Reply Admin

Jay:

It would be more useful to look at the real history of the American West rather than the Hollywood version. I've seen several studies that found that the murder rate in the "old West" was lower than that in most American cities today.

True - it's hard to have a high murder rate when there's nobody around, and IMO, large populations are one major difference between then and now.

They had MORE gun control laws back then. The famous gunfight at the OK Corral was Tombstone's town marshall and posse trying to enforce the local gun laws. Everyone survived except Billy Clanton, and three of the lawmen were tried for his murder. They were released, but the shooting of a criminal was taken more seriously than many people think.

2014-07-07 Reply Admin

Jay:
Friedrice The Great:
chubertdev:

Well, an armed society is a polite society.
Hmmm, just look at the history of the American West for a contradiction of that piece of BS.

It would be more useful to look at the real history of the American West rather than the Hollywood version. I've seen several studies that found that the murder rate in the "old West" was lower than that in most American cities today.

Sure, if you watch Hollywood Westerns you might get the idea that bandit gangs would terrorize towns all the time and people were regularly shooting each other in the streets. But if you watch Hollywood crime shows, you'd think the same thing happens in Detroit or Washington DC today. Well, okay, bad example ...

Sort of shot yourself in the foot with that one.

2014-07-07 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Jay:
Friedrice The Great:
chubertdev:

Well, an armed society is a polite society.
Hmmm, just look at the history of the American West for a contradiction of that piece of BS.

It would be more useful to look at the real history of the American West rather than the Hollywood version. I've seen several studies that found that the murder rate in the "old West" was lower than that in most American cities today.

Sure, if you watch Hollywood Westerns you might get the idea that bandit gangs would terrorize towns all the time and people were regularly shooting each other in the streets. But if you watch Hollywood crime shows, you'd think the same thing happens in Detroit or Washington DC today. Well, okay, bad example ...

+1

Gun violence is the worst in the American cities with strictest gun laws, like Chicago and DC.

Correlation is not causation.

chubertdev · 2014-07-08 Reply Admin

Reductio Ad Ridiculousum:
chubertdev:
Jay:
Friedrice The Great:
chubertdev:

Well, an armed society is a polite society.
Hmmm, just look at the history of the American West for a contradiction of that piece of BS.

It would be more useful to look at the real history of the American West rather than the Hollywood version. I've seen several studies that found that the murder rate in the "old West" was lower than that in most American cities today.

Sure, if you watch Hollywood Westerns you might get the idea that bandit gangs would terrorize towns all the time and people were regularly shooting each other in the streets. But if you watch Hollywood crime shows, you'd think the same thing happens in Detroit or Washington DC today. Well, okay, bad example ...

+1

Gun violence is the worst in the American cities with strictest gun laws, like Chicago and DC.
Correlation is not causation.

True. The research shows that it's the type of gun laws that affect crime numbers. Trying to limit who owns guns fails. It doesn't increase crime, but doesn't decrease it.

However, making the penalty for possessing a gun illegally or misusing it so severe that it's not worth it has been shown to reduce gun crime.

Source: Freakonomics (Why do drugs dealers still live with their moms? chapter)

2014-07-08 Reply Admin

chubertdev:

True. The research shows that it's the type of gun laws that affect crime numbers. Trying to limit who owns guns fails. It doesn't increase crime, but doesn't decrease it.

However, making the penalty for possessing a gun illegally or misusing it so severe that it's not worth it has been shown to reduce gun crime.

Source: Freakonomics (Why do drugs dealers still live with their moms? chapter)

I looked it up. Interesting, thx.

2019-12-19 Reply Admin

Seriously? Spending Million$$$ porting to different languages as opposed to writing primary code in C with autogenerated FFI wrappers?

if(useTCP) return;

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