@tsaukpaetra The sonic screwdriver always seemed like a really cheap literary device. Just point it at something and buzz a bit, and it unlocks.
Yet, with these "smart locks" it suddenly seems entirely realistic.
@tsaukpaetra The sonic screwdriver always seemed like a really cheap literary device. Just point it at something and buzz a bit, and it unlocks.
Yet, with these "smart locks" it suddenly seems entirely realistic.
@raceprouk said in Well... Shit.:
Also, as you can see, it's totally invisible:
What if that is just the decoy tower, and the real one is perfectly camouflaged somewhere else?
What if the real tower was built sideways, so that it doesn't stick out of the ground that much? Think outside the box!
@PJH I saw "A girl" "her boyfriend's balls" and "Blender" in the same sentence and got momentarily scared.
@polygeekery [insert joke about how the algorithm got it right]
Standing in the middle of the road is a Bad Idea, you can get hit.
@asdf said in Intel releases the X299 lineup:
@anonymous234 said in Intel releases the X299 lineup:
Some day I'll understand what all these numbers mean. But it is not this day.
I am 99% sure this confusion is intentional.
I'm sure it is.
Non-descriptive naming is a major pet peeve of mine actually. Or rather, the fact that it's fucking everywhere.
I get that CPUs are actually complicated and it might make sense here because most users don't usually see it and all that. But when you go to a consumer store and everything is "HP 15-AY117NS", "Asus F540SA-XX445T", "Acer ES1-523-237" (these are actual laptop names btw).
And of course because they all have fucking HUNDREDS of product lines changing every few months, and each country has their own variations, and each product has 4 or 5 small variations that change a single letter in the name, and THE WHOLE THING IS NOT DOCUMENTED ANYWHERE because the fucking website only shows you 4 models and everything else gets "un-personed". Aghhhh.
Is there a point to that? Does confusing your customers actually make more sales, or are their marketing people just terribly incompetent?
Look, it's not that hard. First you find a brand name that's as descriptive as you can, while still being unique: "iPhone", "Surface", "ThinkPad", "Asus Transformer", they all work fine. As long as you stick with the name. The name must not be changed as long as the product line exists. Now you combine the product line name, a number or year, possibly a physical characteristic of the product ("11 inch", "21 inch") and then you can have a few variations for each product ("pro", "lite").
iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPhone 6. MacBook 2014, MacBook 2015, MacBook 2016. MacBook Air 13-inch, MacBook Pro 13-inch. Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4, Surface Laptop. See? Not that hard.
From reddit: "My cat has been weighing himself 20 times a day on the FitBit scale... and FitBit is dutifully logging it."
https://i.imgur.com/tBFBVOi.jpg
@Onyx This whole thread is convincing me that Javascript is a much worse language than PHP.
To vindicate @blakeyrat's point about CLIs, I'll re-tell a personal anecdote:
There's a partitioning program you've probably used called GParted. It's the standard in all GTK-based distros, and it actually has a really good UI in my opinion, one of the few examples of nice and properly designed Linux programs.
When you make a change to a partition, it adds that change to a "pending actions" list, and when you click a button it applies all the changes in the list. Actions are decomposed into their sub-actions (e.g. resize a partition = check file system, resize partition, resize file system) and every action is done by calling an external command line program or a library function (and you can see the output of all those actions).
So, I tried to resize a NTFS partition. First it successfully modified the partition limits, then it called the command line program ntfsresize
to resize the file system in it.
...however, the ntfsresize
developers had recently added an "are you sure you wish to continue?" prompt, which GParted was not programmed to expect. It detected an unknown output and stopped the entire operation, leaving a partially-resized partition. Oops.
And there's the problem. Programmers should be able to change their programs' human interfaces without breaking other programs.
only this one almost 10 years old
I think reading old articles about the future of computing is much more educational than reading new ones.
@remi Reminds me of the story of WalMart opening stores in Germany and being all like "you have to greet all customers at the door and have a big smile all the time" and both employees and customers were like ""
Take a deep breath because this is pretty fucked up.
I'll quote and bold the most important paragraphs for your reading comfort:
The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.
[...]
As the two hackers remotely toyed with the air-conditioning, radio, and windshield wipers, I mentally congratulated myself on my courage under pressure. That’s when they cut the transmission.
Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be
fun.
[...]
Miller and Valasek’s full arsenal includes functions that at lower speeds fully kill the engine, abruptly engage the brakes, or disable them altogether. The most disturbing maneuver came when they cut the Jeep’s brakes, leaving me frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-ton SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch. The researchers say they’re working on perfecting their steering control—for now they can only hijack the wheel when the Jeep is in reverse. Their hack enables surveillance too: They can track a targeted Jeep’s GPS coordinates, measure its speed, and even drop pins on a map to trace its route.
[...]
Uconnect, an Internet-connected computer feature in hundreds of thousands of Fiat Chrysler cars, SUVs, and trucks, controls the vehicle’s entertainment and navigation, enables phone calls, and even offers a Wi-Fi hot spot. And thanks to one vulnerable element, which Miller and Valasek won’t identify until their Black Hat talk, Uconnect’s cellular connection also lets anyone who knows the car’s IP address gain access from anywhere in the country.
From that entry point, Miller and Valasek’s attack pivots to an adjacent chip in the car’s head unit—the hardware for its entertainment system—silently rewriting the chip’s firmware to plant their code. That rewritten firmware is capable of sending commands through the car’s internal computer network, known as a CAN bus, to its physical components like the engine and wheels. Miller and Valasek say the attack on the entertainment system seems to work on any Chrysler vehicle with Uconnect from late 2013, all of 2014, and early 2015.
[...]
Second, Miller and Valasek have been sharing their research with Chrysler for nearly nine months, enabling the company to quietly release a patch ahead of the Black Hat conference. [...] Unfortunately, Chrysler’s patch must be manually implemented via a USB stick or by a dealership mechanic. That means many—if not most—of the vulnerable Jeeps will likely stay vulnerable.
So what now? Will thousands of vulnerable cars just be allowed to roam out there like that, because Chrysler can't be assed to make a wireless patch? That's a mass murderer's wet dream. Will they even be punished for their gross negligence?
And what makes me more angry is that people will probably blame technology, and say that cars should not have an internet connection in the first place, and all that stuff. But technology is not at fault here. There's just no culture of security in companies.
If you design a car's entertainment system with the proper methodology, in a language and environment focused on security (i.e. not C), with quality control, code reviews, safeties, formal verification for the critical parts, and obviously without letting the goddamn brakes take orders from the online media player, there's no way a disaster like this can happen.
@heterodox said in Fight about discourse here:
Edit found it: https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/266256
@end said in Genuinely Useful Bug Reports:
Yeah the nested quotes thing is really hideous. I need to revert that commit, sorry @ben_lubar, this is an atrocity:
I still can't understand what was going on in his head about nested quotes. That doesn't look like an atrocity to me, it looks like a normal forum quote, apart from the different levels lacking slightly darker background colors.
Before Android 6.0, external storage was considered unreliable. For this reason, some applications could not be installed to it, since if you removed the storage then those apps would stop working, and in certain cases (widgets, alarms, background services, etc.) this could mess up the system. In fact, Android used the conservative approach and only allowed apps that specifically stated that it was OK to install them there. This was quite a problem as we all know developers are lazy pieces of shit and most (>2/3) did not bother specifying that option.
In Android 6.0, they introduced a new feature called Adoptable Storage. Adopting external storage means it "acts like internal storage" and should never ever be removed without warning. It gets formatted and encrypted to only work with your specific device, for various security reasons.
And that's it right? Seems pretty obvious that this is a perfect solution to that specific problem? Well, as you can probably guess from the title and category of this post, not really. You still can't move applications there unless they specifically state that they can be moved there.
What's the point then? As far as I can tell, using the Adoptable Storage has no advantages as all for the user other than encryption. It seems like the super intelligent geniuses at Google saw a common problem, developed a solution for it, and then simply refused to implement it .
So what this means is that millions of people will buy one of those cheap Chinese phones or tablets with 4GB of internal storage (just enough for the OS), thinking they can just pop in a MicroSD card if they want to install more shit, only to find out that you actually can't do that (without rooting) simply because Google decided not to let you, despite there not being any clear technical reason for that.
And that, Google, is called being evil.
The topic of reading a product description and still being left wondering what exactly it does has been brought up before.
While the most egregious cases are the ones caused by an excess of "marketing-speak", I think many are simply due to a failure to explain things to outsiders.
A particular case is products that bundle related features. For example, ASP.NET is always described simply as a "web framework". This just tells you that it's a thing intended for you to make websites with, which could still be a million different things. Or anything described as a "game engine", which can range anywhere from just being a simple wrapper around OpenGL and input events to all sorts of stuff like physics, AI, level design, etc.
In those cases, since there is no name that can fully describe the product, the website should have a small blurb to do the work - but in my experience, it often doesn't.
But maybe that's just me. I'm kind of obsessive about wanting to know exactly how things work before using them, while simultaneously lacking the will to actually sit down and read a bunch of documentation about them.
I've been thinking about starting a wiki dedicated to describing software products in a simple way - from the point of view of what "services" it provides for the user or other software. The idea being it would be the default place you look at when you hear a new name. Do you think there is a demand for that?
Samsung engineering team:
https://i.imgur.com/wHV6U74.gifv
: "Polly want cracker!"
: "You need to eat healthier. Here, try some broccoli"
:
http://i.imgur.com/oggkVAU.gifv
So I was browsing Wikipedia and see a page with some spammy looking irrelevant link at the bottom.
Being a good citizen, I decide to remove it.
I click "edit".
I scroll down to the end of the page source.
The editor finishes loading and automatically scrolls me back up to the top.
I scroll down to the end of the page source, again.
An annoying message pops up asking me if I want to use the visual editor.
I click no.
The page scrolls me back up to the top, again.
I scroll down to the end of the page source, again.
I remove the link and click save.
Fucking web developers.
@Steve_The_Cynic Graphic designers gotta earn their keep by remaking random stuff we already have.
Unlike programmers, who would never do something like that¡
Guys. It's pretty damn obvious trolling and you're still falling for it.
I opened Visual Studio Code's settings. Rather than get a settings window, it opens a JSON text file thing with the preferences
WTF?! I thought blakeyrat was just exaggerating, but no, Microsoft has gone full retard and joined the "TEXT FILES ARE THE BEST UI" cult.
But what makes it an order of magnitude worse is, it's not actually a text file. You still have to click in the individual settings and it shows a menu with the possible values. So it's all the work of making a GUI with all the niceness of a text file.
@PleegWat said in Lorne has the misfortune of being an idiot by circumstance: my experience with windows 10 so far:
because playing DVDs always requires an mpeg license, Which costs about $15.
Unless you're a monster that uses unlicensed players like VLC/MPC-HC. You monster. MPEG-LA members needed those $15 to survive.
Why, it's almost as evil as using ad blockers.
@ben_lubar I have a hypothesis: they know some people just click on surveys because they're bored and give bullshit answers "for the lulz". They know those people will probably choose North Korea, so their answers can be easily filtered.
@doctorjones
“Do you know any good GDPR consultants?”
“Yes.”
“Can I get their contact information?”
“No”
Just acknowledging that blockchain projects are theoretically capable of not being good ideas is already a massive step. I applaud Fujitsu and their bravery.
How do you scare a WTDWTF user for Halloween?
Wear this costume
https://i.redd.it/50jeybcxvztx.jpg
Of all the things Stack Exchange does, the one I find most annoying is that, as an anonymous user, I can add answers, but not comments.
I will never want to add an answer, I don't look at questions that don't already have one. I do see answers that could be improved or fixed all the time, but apparently that's none of my business.
From a job position:
[name redacted] is a rapidly growing start-up company developing a new way of browsing. We are basing our browser on the blockchain technology. Our browser is currently in beta stage, and available for your phone, tablet and computer.
Well, er, good luck with that.
@anonymous234 said in Hmmmmmmm - part 391 VS Code suspicious amounts of memory:
I wonder if they'll make a new version of Windows, call it Windows Core and have it actually not be Windows in any way?
Holy shit, I swear I made that up as a joke
@TimeBandit Pro: finally hinges that won't break in a year
Con: doesn't dissipate heat very well
As a brutalism enthusiast, I'm hoping they'll release a laptop made of concrete next.