The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Netflix is Smarter than You Are

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-08-29

"I never thought that The Princess Diaries and The Shining had anything in common, but who am I to argue with Netflix's magic algorithms?" Neal L. wrote.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-14

Nulltastic!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-08-22

"I'm kind of surprised to see these kinds of positive ratings for soundtracks that may or may not exist," writes Bobby S.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-23

Misguided Optimization

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2014-08-20

States and their abbreviations are among my favorite kinds of data - they almost never ever change and, as such, you can hard code all that information into your app. I mean, why bother fetching it from the database every page load? That's just wasted CPU cycles.

So, I can find merit in the hard-coded approach that the below code takes that Alex E. sent our way. However, I definitely believe that it takes guts for anybody to make a claim about the efficiency of strcmp() when you perform a linear search on an ordered list.

86 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-21

The Ouroboros Request

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-08-15

Rob wrote, "I was trying to raise a service request for an Office 365 issue but the service request functionality was broken. I could of course try and report this... by raising a service request."

29 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-14

Welcome to Word!

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-08-08

"The first time I started up Word 2013, it offered to give me a tour. Upon reflection, this probably is a pretty accurate tour," writes Matt M..

48 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-14

Schrödinger's Attendee and more Best of Emails

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2014-08-06

99% of terrible emails are just that. Horrible. However, there's that glimmering 1% of terrible emails that are so bad that they end up being pretty good. Here are a few of them. And, as always, remember - send us your (best) worst emails. We love them!

Schrödinger's Attendee (From Aaron S.)

65 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-08

nullnull, nullnullnull, and null

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2014-08-01

"Wow! The IEEE takes privacy so seriously that they redacted the entire table of contents!" Jeremy R. wrote.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2022-09-06