WTF 20™
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So there's the S&P 500, the Fortune 20, and so on. I propose we publish the WTF 20™, a list of the 20 companies providing the most WTF to society.
Enlightened Electronics would be a shoo-in. WtfCorp would have short odds.
As
detailed research and analysishaving a staff writer make stuff up costs real money, I propose the scientifically sound methodology of an Internet poll. This would probably have to be some complicated Multiple Transferable Vote sort of thing.Not that I'm volunteering to do any actual work.
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INB4 Oracle
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INB4 Oracle
Don't forget IBM and whatever @SpectateSwamp's company is called.
Oh, and Jeff Atwood. Put him on the list even though he's not a company.
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@Greybeard said in WTF 20™:
companies providing the most WTF
For literally providing The Daily WTF, the companies are:
- Inedo
- Telligent
- Civilized Discourse Construction Kit
- Design Create Play
If there were twenty of them, we'd have some major problems with imports.
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I also propose:
- Canonical, because of their NIH syndrome, vaporware like Mir and shitty software like Ubuntu One. Also for their great product strategy: Announce, stop developing one year after announcement, put on life support for 3 years, then discontinue and finally adopt what every other distro uses.
- Microsoft, for Skype and releasing Windows 10 in a horribly unstable state (admittedly it's starting to get better now)
- HP, because HP
- @Arantor's employer, whatever they're called.
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@asdf Needless to say I'm not prepared to out the name of the company.
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@ben_lubar said in WTF 20™:
Don't forget IBM
I almost gave them a pass until I remembered they still give us Lotus Notes.
Also to be included: all governments, their agencies and official organisations.
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@Luhmann and they gave us JSON as XML
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@Arantor And XML as PYX
no, wait, that might be a good thing
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@flabdablet said in WTF 20™:
no, wait, that might be a good thing
It solves none of the problems with XML. You still have three ways to provide data and you still have to duplicate close tags, but in addition it looks ugly as shit.
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[PYX] solves none of the problems with XML.
ASN.1? It solves the problems with XML, and also gets rid of the good features of it too!
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@dkf good features? Like, being hierarchical? Because that's the only XML feature I can think of and isn't application-specific.
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It solves none of the problems with XML
It's a useful intermediate format for doing regex-based bulk edits on XML files in ways that won't fuck them up. I've used it to do quite involved edits to XML config files safely with sed; the resulting script ended up way smaller and easier to understand than it would have done if I'd had to wheel in a full-blown XML parser.
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@Gąska I'm sorry you don't know what you're talking about, but I guess that's what you get for working always in a much more restricted environment than others. You should go and try working with ASN.1.
XML is not the nicest of formats, but you can at a pinch work with it in a text editor. It's not nearly as vicious as some of the other standard tree interchange formats, and (most of?) the more readable ones achieve that partially by ignoring the namespacing problem. Namespaces are ugly, but really critical for complex systems where different collections of names must be woven together in a single document.
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You should go and try working with ASN.1.
I work with TTCN-3, which incorporates ASN.1 as part of its syntax. Close enough?
the more readable ones achieve that partially by ignoring the namespacing problem
As Stefan Kisielewski would say, XML heroically overcomes problems that don't exist in any other format. Namespaces are only useful for applications that are designed up-front to be extensible in a very particular way, and it's trivial to implement similar mechanism in other formats.
Namespaces are ugly, but really critical for complex systems where different collections of names must be woven together in a single document.
I'm sure that some applications benefit from them. But they are at most 1% of applications that use XML.
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@Gąska I LOVE LONG INVOLVED DISCUSSIONS OF XML KEEP GOING THIS IS SO ENTERTAINING!
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Namespaces are only useful for applications that are designed up-front to be extensible in a very particular way, and it's trivial to implement similar mechanism in other formats.
No. You've not really realised just how nasty some of the data interchange formats out there are. The purpose of a namespace is to allow you to refer to someone else's vocabulary, and without a namespacing mechanism you've either got to deal with some sort of name importing system (a hell of a lot more complicated!) or you've got real challenges when two groups independently define their own
FooBar
and you need to integrate between the two. It's just the same horrible thing that happens when you've “helpfully” got a pair of DLLs that both define anEval()
function and you've been tasked with getting everything working in one process. (I know how to do it; it's not pretty.) Virtually everyone who argues against namespacing seems to just argue that everyone's names should simply be chosen to not collide with anything else. There are ways to do that with GUIDs or UUIDs, but they're miserably awful to debug and still require that someone had the foresight to start with that; without it, you've got a fight over what123
means this time “because it's obvious and so we'll never tell you!”.
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I'm not prepared to out the name of the company.
So give them a pseudonym.
(I'm still 200 posts behind on your thread, so please forgive me if you've done this recently.)
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FWIW, I suspect that the only companies ranked higher than WtfCorp in the Fortune 500 with worse IT Management are our customers.
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@blakeyrat said in WTF 20™:
@Gąska I LOVE LONG INVOLVED DISCUSSIONS OF XML KEEP GOING THIS IS SO ENTERTAINING!
OK.
The purpose of a namespace is to allow you to refer to someone else's vocabulary, and without a namespacing mechanism you've either got to deal with some sort of name importing system (a hell of a lot more complicated!) or you've got real challenges when two groups independently define their own FooBar and you need to integrate between the two.
Except, as was explained to me in that thread, namespacing is implemented in application layer, not library layer, so whether namespaces are any help is application-specific. In other words, XML doesn't save me any extra work except maybe coming up with syntax.
without a namespacing mechanism you've either got to deal with some sort of name importing system (a hell of a lot more complicated!)
What arexmlns:
attributes other than scoped imports?It's just the same horrible thing that happens when you've “helpfully” got a pair of DLLs that both define an Eval() function and you've been tasked with getting everything working in one process. (I know how to do it; it's not pretty.)
Depends on what language these DLLs use. C is pretty straight-forward, C# looks rather easy too. I imagine that C++ can be hell, and other languages might lack the necessary facilities and it's pretty much impossible in them.
Virtually everyone who argues against namespacing seems to just argue that everyone's names should simply be chosen to not collide with anything else.
Pretty reasonable stance in application-specific formats, don't you think? Also - I'm not against namespacing in general - I just say that in 99% of cases when you want a file, you don't need namespacing, and the fact that XML has out-of-the-box syntax for namespacing doesn't help you much in practice.
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I nominate IBM
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disregard that, whoever created mongodb and nodejs should be at the top in any top wtf
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I almost gave them a pass until I remembered they still give us Lotus Notes.
Also Tivoli Access Manager!
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@boomzilla Heard some wtf stuff about IBM Maximo
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tumblr (or just make it Yahoo, they bought them a few years ago)
They even suck at software - their audio and video players are notorious for being almost completely broken.
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audio and video player
RealPlayer! That's a nostalgic WTF ...
Oh and Adobe ...
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Citrix
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@accalia
node.js obviously doesn't equal JavaScript
Filed under: [not unix](#tag)
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node.js obviously doesn't equal JavaScript
nodejs is javascript, tweaked to run on the server with a big standard library glued on the side.
also, :thatsthejoke.avi:
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RealPlayer! That's a nostalgic WTF ...
This made me realize I still don't know what QuickTime is and why I had it installed 10 years ago.
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tumblr (or just make it Yahoo, they bought them a few years ago)
Evil plan for today: figure out how to move the Yahoo Answers userbase to Tumblr.
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I still don't know what QuickTime is and why I had it installed 10 years ago.
lucky bastard!
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It might be easier to pick 20 IT companies that aren't TRWTF. I'll start.
Hmm....
uh....well...
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This made me realize I still don't know what QuickTime is and why I had it installed 10 years ago.
In case you really don't - video. Back in the time, it seemed one of the few players that could play everything.
Better not have it installed now! It's now considered a security hole. And unsupported.
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@blakeyrat said in WTF 20™:
I LOVE LONG INVOLVED DISCUSSIONS OF XML KEEP GOING THIS IS SO ENTERTAINING!
Dude. "WTF" is in the very topic title.
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RealPlayer! That's a nostalgic WTF ...
This made me realize I still don't know what QuickTime is and why I had it installed 10 years ago.
It plays apple's video format files. It was that era's MP4 if memory serves.
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@Tsaukpaetra and the actual MP4 format is derived directly from QuickTime. To the point you almost can't tell them apart without deep, deep understanding of the format.
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@Tsaukpaetra and the actual MP4 format is derived directly from QuickTime. To the point you almost can't tell them apart without deep, deep understanding of the format.
That would explain why I thought of that as an example... lol.
Does that count as a joke? And did it fall flat?
If yesno, then I'll add to the unintended_jokes_that_fell_flat pool...
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he's my hero!
Ah, proof she's been off her meds for a while!
meds?!
MEDS?!
YOU GEWT THOSE ORDERLIES AWAY FROM ME! I'M NOT GOING BACK! I'M NOT GOING BACK!
-sob-
I'm not going back there again.
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-sob-
I'm not going back there again.*hugs @accalia* It's OK, if we're good, they sometimes give us crayons and we can draw things!
The walls look better when they're not so white...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF 20™:
It plays apple's video format files. It was that era's MP4 if memory serves.
Huh. The only video format I remember from that time is AVI.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF 20™:
It plays apple's video format files. It was that era's MP4 if memory serves.
Huh. The only video format I remember from that time is AVI.
Awe, no BNK (Bink) video? :P
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LoadLibrary/GetProcAddress isn't that difficult.
True, but it's a little more complex if you've got to stitch together conflicting dependencies too.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF 20™:
-sob-
I'm not going back there again.*hugs @accalia* It's OK, if we're good, they sometimes give us crayons and we can draw things!
The walls look better when they're not so white...
I got told off the last time I did that. How was I supposed to know that regular octagons shouldn't tesselate?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF 20™:
-sob-
I'm not going back there again.*hugs @accalia* It's OK, if we're good, they sometimes give us crayons and we can draw things!
The walls look better when they're not so white...
I got told off the last time I did that. How was I supposed to know that regular octagons shouldn't tesselate?
!!! They shouldn't?
That would explain the frowns then...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF 20™:
Awe, no BNK (Bink) video? :P
Back then, I was too young to be interested in the file format used in game cinematics.
True, but it's a little more complex if you've got to stitch together conflicting dependencies too.
I don't know your exact situation, but I would probably use this tool and then make proxy libraries that would statically link to these no-longer-DLLs and hide their APIs behind another layer. Or something.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF 20™:
The walls look better when they're not so white...
This sounds surprisingly pro-Trump.