🙅 THE BAD IDEAS THREAD
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Bad idea: keeping your database server up and running and letting users be in the application when you try to apply an update that includes schema changes, then hitting "cancel" when you get a a message that a user has the schema locked.
GUESS WHAT, YOU JUST HOSED YOUR DATABASE. LISTEN TO ME WHEN I TELL YOU NOT TO DO THAT. I SAID IT FOR A REASON.
Fortunately, the database isn't actually hosed, but a couple of indexes are likely to have been renamed to "temp_12345" and now none of the programs that use those tables will compile, based on what happend with the last 6 customers that did this. My boss keeps saying "we can't tell users to shut down the database server." I keep saying "well, we can expect this to keep happening, then."
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"Customers are TRWTF", I believe. But really, the boss is.
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Telling me you don't have any referential integrity in your product while trying to sell it to us.
My company wants to buy a hardware thing that has a complex backend. One of the vendors technical sales people came in to see if it could be made to extract data from one of our existing balls-of-wtf-and-sql that has very useful data if it could be tied to their thing.
We went spelunking in the existing db to see if we could see the data we wanted, I found a likely looking table and the chap exclaimed that one field was probably tied back to a user id we'd seen earlier. I suggested we have a quick look at the references to see. He immediately said not to bother as it probably wouldn't be as their own db didn't bother with any pesky references "our programmers are very careful and know what the mappings are".
He was right anyway. It wasn't an FK and the id was linked in another table to a base_id. The best bit is that the id can change independently of the base_id and quite a few tables use the id. That would explain the strange losses of data when users are re-ordered in that system I guess.
This existing thing is a very famous enterprise software system made by a huge multinational.
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Oh well, FKs are fine until you try to delete something. OTOH, a database shouldn't delete anything.
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Wait, what?
It's how Progress works. I don't know how to compare it to SQL, so I'll just describe it. Our upgrade process, in this case, needed to modify three indexes in two tables (IIRC; I'll find out for sure when I fix the customer's system, but this is what I remember.) It does that (again, IIRC) by adding a new index with a temporary name, then deleting the old one and renaming the new one. The extra work is in case you're messing with the primary index, in case you're wondering. This failed because the users were in the application in spite of the fact that we've been telling people for years not to do this--the upgrader even refuses to run if anyone's in the application when you start it up, although we don't do continuous checking, so you can log in after the upgrader starts.
Once the schema change is done, we compile all programs. Because the other developers are stuck in the 80s, they don't believe that the compiler is smart enough to pick its own indices, so some of our code specifically refers to the index it wants. Well, "select * from table use-index whatever-index-name" doesn't work when "whatever-index-name" doesn't exist because it's still "temp-12345". So when the customer's ready I have to go in to his system and rename the indices and kick off an app rebuild.
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a database shouldn't delete anything
That depends on the purpose of that database, Shirley. Not everything needs to keep historical records for all time.
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That's because female hyenas have a pseudo-penis from the extremely high testosterone levels. Giving birth means splitting their junk apart. Bet that's something you didn't want to know.
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This commercial was on TV today:
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That is both very interesting and I hate you for making me know that. :-)
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Let's combine the worst of the new comment section with the worst of the old comment section!
https://meta.discourse.org/t/fight-spam-with-the-akismet-plugin/22570
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It's getting frightening. Vote for the racists/xenophobes or the thinly-disguised racists/xenophobes (BNP and UKIP respectively for those not up on UK political parties).
I don't understand why there is such a negative spin in this country. People want to come to our country and work hard, that's great! A very small number of those people are abusing our benefit system? OK, just make rules fairer...doesn't seem like a insurmountable problem and it's only tangentially related anyway.
Edit: Spelling correction
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zenophobes
Did you mean xenophobes?
Zenophobes would have a phobia of people having running competitions with turtles.
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Oops, yes. People with a phobia of ancient Greek philosophers would be more tolerable though.
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Did you mean xenophobes?Zenophobes would have a phobia of people having running competitions with turtles.
Zenophobes have an unnatural fear of the sound of one hand clapping.
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I don't understand why there is such a negative spin in this country.
Because it sells newspapers. Why behave responsibly or invest in good journalism when spewing cheap stupid HATE will work?
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People want to come to our country and work hard, that's great! A very small number of those people are abusing our benefit system? OK, just make rules fairer...doesn't seem like a insurmountable problem and it's only tangentially related anyway.
If you figure out how to make people not be stupid on this, I've got a whole political party full of Americans who'd love to buy the secret off you. In the meantime, the other party'd be glad to sell you blueprints for a really big wall ;)
In all seriousness, though, this seems to be a universal thing.
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This commercial was on TV today:
I love how people in "As Seen on TV" products--and this kind of thing--are so easily stumped by common, every-day things like opening a milk carton.
Also, the whole XP screenshots on that commercial.
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Snort. You can summarize that by "I got spam and I hate my users so I made it so they can't post"
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If you're on holiday and have plenty of time to kill, here's a TvTropes link to eat your soul: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TooIncompetentToOperateABlanket
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I was kidding, of course, but I noticed the first example other than some obscure anime and movies was...the clip I linked. And I think the person who put that example in must fit the category because he said "if you're not allowed to use scissors to open a milk carton, you probably would need [the Milk Master]" Then it mentions Rachel actually used one a few scenes later, which I have never seen, so of course now I need to find that episode.
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You probably wanted to click through to where they moved the advertising examples to a whole page of their own: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TooIncompetentToOperateABlanket/Advertising
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Oh wow.
The laptop at 0:43 is running an X11 DE, probably Gnome2.
Isn't their name poorly chosen, then?
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Acquiring webOS:
https://gigaom.com/2014/08/28/a-failed-experiment-how-lg-screwed-up-its-webos-acquisition/
Basically, LG decided that their currently Android based smart TV software wasn't competitive and decided to use... webOS (now called webOSTV isn't nice?). Because it worked so well for Palm and HP.
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In all seriousness, though, this seems to be a universal thing.
Our [Australia] current government reclaimed power by shouting "Stop the boats!", just like the same party did so successfully before. Racist fuckers in this country voted for them because we don't like genuine refugees because they're brown people on boats, we only like white people arriving on planes and overstaying visas or working illegally.
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I gave up watching at 6:45 after she dismiss fossils as evidence without offering any better explanation.
And when I realized that Megan fox is her and not her
http://www.amigosdoforum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/meganfoxevolution2.jpg
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hence why it's in this thread
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Our [Australia] current government reclaimed power by shouting "Stop the boats!", just like the same party did so successfully before. Racist fuckers in this country voted for them because we don't like genuine refugees because they're brown people on boats, we only like white people arriving on planes and overstaying visas or working illegally.
TRBI = Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison
Filed Under: The Real Bad Idea
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I thought that one was an off-topic.
no sad face emoji
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You did better than me, I ragequit after 45 seconds.
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Bad idea: breaking backwards compatibility.
The previous version of the site still worked. See? I told you change was bad.
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Is that Win3.0?
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Yeah, she is nuttier than squirrel shit. For further reading, check out this: http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/orland-park-homer-glen/ct-orland-library-controversy-tl-ssw-0904-20140902-story.html
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Bad idea: breaking backwards compatibility.
...in hardware.
Great. You came up with a new kind of output port that lets you connect to an external display device in new ways never even thought of before. Go ahead and add that port to your new line of laptops.
But don't take away the VGA port in the process. Some of the external display devices you're going to run into don't have anything else.
Or if you're going to do a presentation some place, plan on taking your own projector, and while you're at it your own roll-up projector screen, halfway across the continent to any place you've agreed to speak.
Or at the very least, when you spring some new flavor-of-the-month requirement on the people supplying the infrastructure to run your presentation, don't do it while attendees are already filing into the room and then act flarging surprised that they don't have it on hand to accommodate you.
(Can anyone tell how I spent my Thanksgiving weekend?)
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It's 3.1, with IE 5. (And the previous incarnation of TDWTF actually did work on that platform. It didn't quite render correctly, things like the sidebar actually being at the bottom, but it was legible and usable, i.e. graceful degradation.)
I actually went back and tested some more sites. It's quite amazing to see what will still work, actually. As long as it doesn't involve much "web 2.0", copious amounts of Javascript, or SSL, it'll mostly work. phpBB instances work fine and are usable.
It even auto-redirected to Bing when I typed a search term into the address bar. So Microsoft's 1999-era links are set up to redirect to their modern equivalents. Speaking of which, Bing also works, though it doesn't really look good.
Now I wonder if I can somehow get a modern-ish browser (with CSS support etc.) onto it. (TRWTF?)
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plan on taking your own projector, and while you're at it your own roll-up projector screen, halfway across the continent to any place you've agreed to speak.
Surely a newfangled-connector-to-VGA adapter should be enough?
(And test it first. I held a presentation once where my slides turned purple because the adapter had apparently lost one of the channels.)
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Let's combine the worst of the new comment section with the worst of the old comment section!
Coming to a Discourse 1.2 (Undiscoverable Urial) near you:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/fight-spam-with-the-akismet-plugin/22570/5?u=boomzilla
Though I do wonder what it would think about the stuff we post.
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Snort. You can summarize that by "I got spam and I hate my users so I made it so they can't post"
More like, "I'm tired of the god damned red balloons. Kill them with fire."
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This post is deleted!
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YOU KILLED IT!
But I've got the proof right here:
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Though I do wonder what it would think about the stuff we post.
i'm positive it would consider at least 80% of my posts to be spam.
ahem anyway ran across this one today.
here at work passwords must change every 90 days, be strong passwords (according to an idiotic set of rules that mean they don't tend to be strong or memorable) and can't repeat the last 20 passwords. oh and once set can't be changed for a minimum of 60 days.
anyway, enough setup. lets get to the bad idea.
ran across a user today that uses their account picture (the one that shows up where i have the rather fetching Rainbow Dash this month) to be a picture of their password.
Yeah. Literally they look at the login screen at their picture and type what it says to unlock their computer.
that's even worse than a post it!
EDIT: where did that downloads tool tip come from on my start menu? i swear it wasn't there when i grabbed the screen shot, nor when i edited my name....
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YOU KILLED IT!
But I've got the proof right here:
I don't deny it. I got a spurious 500 error on the first post.
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YOU KILLED IT!
But I've got the proof right here:
I don't deny it. I got a spurious 500 error on the first post.
And then again for the first attempt to post this one. But I'll leave this if it duplicates.
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it appears to be duplicated.
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it appears to be duplicated.
great. now i'm getting the 500s