@snover said:
It’s true. Everyone in the world that claims to be a Linux user is really just Richard Stallman in disguise. You can tell from the smell.
LIES! I shower regularly.
*scratches his unshaven neckbeard*
@snover said:
It’s true. Everyone in the world that claims to be a Linux user is really just Richard Stallman in disguise. You can tell from the smell.
LIES! I shower regularly.
*scratches his unshaven neckbeard*
@belgariontheking said:
The title reminds me of our "compression" algorithm, where we don't compress the file, but just throw out 90% of it. "See, it's smaller!"
Reminds me of the high school programming contest my team entered (we were in 10th grade, if memory serves). The project we had to complete beforehand was an image compression algorithm; we'd be scored on runtime, compressed size, and final image quality (assuming we used lossy compression). We opted for run-length encoding on R, G, and B separately, after dropping the least significant two bits of each color. Unfortunately, we screwed up somewhere and zeroed out every color.
We got a decent runtime score and a fantastic compression size score, but I don't think a completely black image made the 'quality' cut...
TRWTF is that we didn't get the worst score.
@blakeyrat said:
Once you have full-text searching in your email client, there's no reason to ever delete anything.
I can think of two reasons:
1) storage quota - free doesn't mean infinite, and even "7 GB and counting" can fill up
2) searches take longer when there's more mail to search through.
But seriously, are you saying you keep year-old advertisements just in case you might have to search it later? I don't get why it's such a weird idea to so many people that someone might delete ad mail. I get e-mails every once in a while from mwave advertising that week's specials; there's literally no reason that will be useful to me once the week is over. What reason could you have to want to keep that sort of mail?
@NSCoder said:
Sometimes I get several spam emails with the same dishonest subject on the same day.
One of my domains has three publicly-listed addresses which all direct to the same mailbox. (heron@, product@, and support@)
At least once every day, I'll get a set of three spam e-mails at almost exactly the same time:
The percentages are always random, but the rest of the subject line is exactly the same. I haven't checked the message contents, but I would assume there's little variation in them.
I suppose I should set up an filter so my mail server won't even accept mail from known spam sources, but I'm kinda lazy...
@Shinhan said:
Why bother deleting anything if you got GMail?
I keep e-mails from friends and family, sure, or e-mails regarding projects I'm working on, but ads from last year? Come on.
Of course, my gmail account is merely a glorified alias. I only hang on to it to use googletalk (and sometimes to search old chat logs).
@CDarklock said:
It seems familiar, so I searched my email for "40% don't normally do this" to discover they sent me the exact same message last year.
You keep year-old advertisements?
@bstorer said:
I do agree with this, but I would also point out that an MS can be acquired while working full-time, which voids part of your monetary argument.
That's true. I won't discourage anyone from getting an MS while working, I just think that getting one before working is counter-productive, and that seems to be the "normal" course of things (at least among people I know).
@galgorah said:
You should definitly go for a masters degree.
Well if we're going to make useful comments... I disagree. An MS in CS isn't necessarily useful. (For the rest of this post, I'm referring only to Computer Science degrees.)
Let's say you spend $20,000 and two years getting your MS, at which point you get a job. The starting salary for MS degrees at my employer is only $5k/year higher than the starting salary for BS degrees.
Personally, I'd say you (that is, the generic "you") should only go for an MS if you like academia - but then, if you like academia, go for a PhD instead (or, as well). Of course, if you can't find a job, getting an MS isn't a bad way to spend your time...
My school stopped providing @wtfu.edu addresses several years ago; they just tell students to go use gmail or hotmail or whatever. (They may provide @wtfu.edu forwards, I don't recall.)
The CS department still provides @cs.wtfu.edu addresses to CS students, for those CS students who are scared of free webmail.
@feelthesicness said:
And my site?? I really dont care. Bash it all you want. It is a shit site. I did it for a quick profile for college.
I did a site for school once, too. I didn't buy a domain name for it, though, nor did I claim I was "THAT good".
I made that site a year ago and havent really cared enough to change it. Took it down because of foul language and the harassing phone calls to the bank in question.
So wait, now the website of the creator of the bank's website isn't even running? If the website of the creator of *my* bank's website was permanently offline, I think I'd be looking for a new place to bank.
every damn person ive built a website for says they want counters on there
If that's the case, you're probably building websites for the wrong people.
Aaand seriously wtf is wrong with the igloo computer??
You mean you don't know? And who paid $2500 for that piece of junk? Was a 15" 1280x1024 the best you could do for $2500? And did you realize that the insulation in the cooler probably makes the machine run hotter?
You tell me something you built that made no sense but made money off of it.
People buy lots of stupid things. Doesn't make those things less stupid.
Im making money, your arent.
I'm pretty sure the online retailers that pay my salary have bigger websites than anything you've ever worked on... and, as others have pointed out, I'm pretty sure I make more than a wal-mart stockboy.
Anyway, guys, I dunno why we're bothering to respond to this guy. He probably won't even read our responses, though his responses to our responses would be fun to read...
@Bulb said:
Did you know you can scroll with the keyboard, too?That's not I would want to defend this masterpiece—just a hint for those who want to laugh at the full pictures. As long as mouse stays in the popped-up image, it will not disappear. Mouse wheel also works.
At work earlier today, the keyboard worked to scroll around, but the mouse wheel did not.
@savar said:
In Safari they show up off screen when you mouse over, so you have to scroll with your mouse because if you reach for the scroll bar the image will disappear, the overflow disappears, and the scroll bars disappear.
It does that in Firefox 3.5, too.
@Mole said:
I wouldn't say that a Canon Legria was a particularly large item either, and why can't they just put the SD card inside the box they'll be putting the Canon in?
It's entirely possible they're shipping each item from a different warehouse, thus preventing them from shipping the items in the same box.
Took it down? It works for me.
Personally I prefer YYYY-MM-DD (or just YYYYMMDD). It has the bonus side effect of proper sorting lexographically, quite useful when looking at directory listings of (log)files with dates for names.
@Mole said:
Using a compiler that doesn't support unions, so they use reserved structure members instead and then #define them?
I don't see what unions have to do with anything...
Having read the article, it's even more a WTF that he wasn't fired for using Linux - he was dropped because he informed the competency test running company that their website was incompatible with Linux.
No, really, that's why. They contacted the hiring company, who then decided he was "refusing to work with Windows".
All because he merely attempted to find out why it didn't work in Linux while he waited for their shipped Windows laptop to arrive.
That's The Real WTF(tm).
@tdb said:
However, the topic of this thread is C++, so VB's workings are insignificant.
I think "irrelevant" is the word you're looking for ;)
@tdb said:
If the ugliness comes from the implicit conversion, how about foos[flag ? 1 : 0]->do_something()?
Nah, I'd still prefer using a map of bool to function pointers (or better, a map of some enum to function pointers).
@tdb said:
I dunno about your sense of aesthetics, but the standard defines the conversion from bool to integer (true -> 1, false -> 0), so it's perfectly acceptable to use a bool to index the two-element array.
Aesthetics is the only reason I'd have for complaining about casting a bool to act as an index... that's why I said "it's ugly".
@topspin said:
Just found this a few days ago. It's not an earth shattering WTF but the sidebar is full of this stuff, so I thought I'd post it anyway:
map<bool, Foo*> fooMap;I think either of
Foo* foo, bar;
Foo* foos[2];
pair<Foo*, Foo*> foos;should have sufficed.
You could do this:
if(bCondition) foo->DoWhatever();
else bar->DoWhatever();
Or this:
/* Probably shouldn't cast bool to int as an array index... it's ugly */
if(bCondition) foos[0]->DoWhatever();
else foos[1]->DoWhatever();
Or this:
if(bCondition) fooPair->first->DoWhatever();
else fooPair->second->DoWhatever();
Or you could do this:
fooMap[bCondition]->DoWhatever();
Yes, the final compiler-generated code is slightly more complex, but it's (arguably) more readable, and if later you need to change it from a bool to an enum or something (to support FileNotFound, of course), you only have to change the variable, rather than having to add in an else-if clause.
@DescentJS said:
Haha. I was startled for a moment to see that I was logged in to Google in that inner frame, beforeI realized what was going on.
@bstorer said:
Also, it's not Ruby-specific, but Google code prettify is a decent client-side syntax highlighter.
That looks interesting, thanks.
@Justice said:
Alternatively, "rewrote" might be code for "refactored heavily."
Especially given this quote from the article:
@the article said:
Instead, I was able to slowly gut the ugly PHP and replace it with beautiful PHP. Launch in stages.
@Aaron said:
@derula said:
That reminds me of this great article I found once.The comments on that page are classic. Over half of them were thinly-veiled paraphrasings of "NO UR WRONG IF U DONT LIKE RUBY THEN IT MUST HAVE BEEN UR FAULT!!!!!"
I thought the same thing.
On a related note, several weeks ago I was working on a quick internal-use pastebin for developers here at my workplace. I had a copy of someone else's BSD-licensed pastebin (which is now offline), which is written in PHP. All I had to do was a quick run through the source code to fix up the pieces the original author had ripped out (mostly database connection stuff). I expected it to take two or maybe three hours, if I worked slow.
A coworker insisted that I use Ruby. He spent near an hour describing the ease with which I could write the pastebin in Ruby. When I asked whether there is a syntax highlighter available in Ruby, he shrugged and said "I'm sure there is." (When he finally tracked one down hours later, it turned out to be a thin Ruby wrapper around a Python syntax highlighter, run via Ruby's equivalent of the "exec" command.)
In the meantime, I finished my PHP rewrite (turned out to be easier to rewrite the UI and storage code than to patch it back up, but I kept the original syntax highlighter). I'm fairly sure he still thinks it would have been "easier" to do it all in Ruby. I'm not saying Ruby's worse than PHP, I'm just saying it's not the magical silver bullet that every Ruby fan I've ever met seems to think it is.
Found in an official Paypal API "constants" file:
[code]/**
# Version: this is the API version in the request.
# It is a mandatory parameter for each API request.
# The only supported value at this time is 2.3
*/
define('VERSION', '54.0');[/code]
I know, TRWTF is PHP. Not relevant.
@mol1111 said:
goto is used in c (see e.g. zlib library). There are at least two good reasons to use goto:
@Justice said:
The only thing your average college professor hates more than using Blackboard, WebCT, etc. is actually having to do the administrative stuff inherent in teaching. But can you blame them? Putting forth some effort to keep track of grades, who wrote which paper, and the like would imply that they actually care.
If we were talking about high school, I would agree with you; however, we're talking about university-level education, and all of my professors actually cared about their jobs. I actually liked learning from my CS teachers.
Your school must have sucked.
@morbiuswilters said:
Well, yes, sorta. I have some knowledge in this domain as I used to work in the educational, hosted software field. It's all crap, but it's really, really difficult to break in. A lot of the funding comes from federal or state governments and that makes it hard to get contracts unless you are well-established. The fact is, you could probably write your own software better than Moodle with a small team and minimal funding but actually getting anyone to use it is impossible.
The trick is to have an "in". Break in to the market via your own school, preferably by getting a good word in from the Dean of your department. Often departments will each have their own contracts, or at least have the ability to have their own contracts; my school's Math department used Moodle hosting even though the school had bought Blackboard hosting for every department.
Blackboard is probably the essence of "TRWTF".
Teachers hate it, students hate it, IT admins hate it... about the only people that don't hate it are the people who are charging (literally) millions of dollars per year to host this stuff for schools.
There's a lucrative market opportunity out there to offer competition to Blackboard based on open source software (isn't Moodle open source?) and charge for hosting. You could charge far less than Blackboard charges, offer far more features and far more stability, and still make off with a metric crapton of cash.
@tdb said:
I don't know the process for getting a game on Steam, but there are several possible WTFs here:
- Eidos being utterly ignorant of which platforms Steam supports, even though they clearly were aware that those games don't work on WinXP
- Valve not checking the games for actually having WinXP support
- Eidos delibrately lying to Valve about WinXP support to get their games on Steam
Those are some of the WTFs I was getting at. As for Valve checking, it may not even have been up to them depending on their distribution contract with Eidos. But, as I noted, those games are no longer for sale on Steam, so someone eventually did something about it.
@derula said:
Does Commandos work with Wine? Might be worth a try. (Though it's probably not possible for you to test it, now)
No, when they gave me a refund they took the purchase off my Steam account, so I don't have the files anymore.
I suppose I could track down some bargain bin copy (possibly on ebay?) and try. Might be worth it.
@Eternal Destiny: My experiences with Steam have been essentially perfect, as well, even if you take into account the whole Commandos business. I am a great fan of Steam; I buy on Steam when I have the choice.
I've found Linux quite capable of running many games through Wine. Unfortunately, anything based on the Source engine is finicky at best - but then, the Source engine is finicky in Windows, too, so I can't really blame Wine there.
But anyway, Darwinia runs natively in Linux, as do the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness games.
I'm not familiar with Steam, but why/how does it prevent you from running games in compatibility mode?
Steam's authentication stuff uses APIs that were not present in Win98, so if you run Steam games in Win98 compatibility mode, they won't work.
@blakeyrat said:
1) Valve doesn't bother to even slightly think about testing whether games on Steam actually work correctly or not
Right or wrong, Valve doesn't have control over that. They just write contracts with publishers. They then give the publisher the APIs necessary to make games compatible with Steam. If the game's startup code calls the Steam auth library, Valve calls it good.
(I'm not a Valve employee, of course, nor do I have any special knowledge, that's just what I gather happens.)
TRWTF is that publishers themselves don't bother testing games on new platforms before selling them - but what do they care? As what's-his-face said in response to my last post,
4) Profit!
2) Despite that, Steam is *still* the best games download service out there, because, amazingly, all the others are WORSE!
QFT.
@superjer said:
OMG noob!
1) Install Win98 on a VM.
2) Copy game to VM drive.
3) Play.
OMG noob!
1) I don't have Win98.
2) Games bought on Steam won't play unless Steam is running.
3) Steam refuses to run in Win98.
@PJH said:
What are the odds that plugging a 101 keyboard into the laptop USB port won't fix these particular 'problems.'
If we generously assume that their claim isn't entirely BS, then your solution would probably completely solve the issue.
However, I'm inclined to believe that either their code is completely moronic (I've never written input code that cares what kind of keyboard you're using), or they're just listing off BS reasons to avoid supporting laptops.
@amischiefr said:
I wouldn't really blame the guys at Eidos. Once a game has been released and sold they really only support it for the first year or so until they make their initial sales. After that they really don't give a crap. Your paying $40 and expecting a tech making $50/hour to actual come up with a fix and push it out just doesn't make sense economically.
No, I don't really have a problem with that. My biggest annoyances were the tech support WTFs. Valve handled it appropriately, from my point of view; I got my refund, and they eventually stopped selling it.
But Eidos' tech support is TRWTF.
@bstorer said:
Oh! In that case, this was an excellent post and I'm glad I read the whole thing. I trust there will be no pop quiz before receiving the cookie?
Yes, there will be a quiz, but only after removing from you any possible means of internet connectivity or saved copies of my post and locking you in a windowless faraday cage with a microphone and speaker.
So, this happened to me around May 2008, but I thought I'd share it with you. There are several WTFs in the story, but at least it has a happy(ish) ending.
I was looking through Steam's game offerings one day, when I noticed the Commandos pack (containing all four Commandos games) for a relatively decent price. I bought the pack, and happily downloaded my four new games.
Figuring I'd start at the beginning, I opened Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and played the first mission. Halfway through, other businesses required my attention, so I attempted to save and quit.
The "save" option was grayed out. A few hours of googling confirmed it - Commandos does not work properly on Windows XP, and there's basically no consistent way to fix it.
So, step one - I e-mailed Eidos tech support, explaining where I bought the game (Steam) and what the problem was (the Save option is grayed out and unusable). Their auto-response on May 10 reads "we'll get right on it."
Two days later, I got the following e-mail: "You can quick-save by pressing Control-S. This is on page 4 of the manual."
WTF #1: Quick-save was also disabled. WTF #2: I bought the game on Steam, and therefore didn't get a manual.
My reponse was lengthy but polite; I explained these two problems, added that my Googling found that tons of other people were having the same problem, and further remarked that they should not be selling broken games. Finally, I requested that they actually look in to the issue rather than copy and paste a scripted reply.
Their response was a request that I send them a DxDiag diagnostic file as an attachment, which I promptly did.
WTF #3: They closed the ticket after a few days with no response.
I opened a new ticket, providing the same information. Repeat the first few e-mails; I sent another DxDiag diagnostic file.
WTF #4: They closed the ticket again, this time mentioning that they never got the dxdiag file.
WTF #5: A few e-mails later, we find that their e-mail system blocks attachments.
So, I copy the contents of the dxdiag file into an e-mail directly, and send that to them.
WTF #6: They send me PDFs of the game manuals.
I respond that that is not remotely relevant.
WTF #7: I get a message several days later (and here I'll copy and paste from the relevant e-mail):
"I spoke with the development team, who said there are a couple reasons you might be experiencing problems with our games." (No, really?)
" - Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was released in 1998, and only supports Windows 98, not Windows XP." (Steam explicitly prevents you from running games in Win98 compatibility mode.)
" - Laptop configurations vary too widely to be able to support them all, so we don't support laptops." (And desktops are less varied?)
" - Many laptops are limited in their ability to be used as gaming machines. This is because of memory configurations, their micro-channel architecture, port configurations and sound systems that are primarily designed to be used with productivity software." (So, a 2 GHz dual core processor with 2GB DDR2 RAM and a GeForce 7300 Go is incapable of running a game from 1998?)
" - The other common problem is that laptop systems will attempt to compress the traditional version of the standard 101-function keyboard (found on almost all desktop systems) into a much smaller keyboard configuration. This is usually done by relying on multifunction keys that allow the user to assign different functions to the same key. Unfortunately, this has been known to cause problems with our games." (This is, of course, theoretically possible, but ridiculous nonetheless.)
" - Sorry, we can't help you. Contact Steam for a refund." (Steam's policy is that they don't give refunds, and they make this abundantly clear every time you make a purchase.)
Alright, that's a few more WTFs there. But let's go on. In my reply, I specified that the issue was also present on my desktop computer; I referred them to three forum threads on three different sites (one of which was Eidos' own site) in which various users were having the same issue; I pointed out various other bugs people have with the games under Windows XP, including the "OUTPUT" folder being missing (and creating it fixed some issues for some users; this was not my problem).
No reply.
In the meantime, I get on the phone with Valve's tech support. (Dr Kleiner's voice greets you. It's nifty.) I speak with a first-teir support guy for a few minutes; he agrees that the situation is ridiculous, and tells me he'll get back to me later that day after he speaks with his superiors.
I then call Eidos' tech support on the phone (for the first time). She asks that I send in a dxdiag report from my desktop and a summary of what's happened so far. I do so.
Later that day, the guy at Valve calls me back saying that they have approved a refund; I ask if I can wait a bit to see if Eidos will fix the problem. He gives me his direct number.
Moments after I get off the phone with Valve, Eidos responds to my e-mail with "Make sure the folder named 'OUTPUT' is being created when Steam installs the game." (Sound familiar?)
I responded by saying "That's not the problem here. You seem entirely unwilling to help, and you're selling a game written for one OS on a platform incompatible with your game, and you refuse to fix it. Valve has offered me a refund, something they claim to never do, so I'm taking it."
So I had my refund, but Injustice (TM) was still being perpetrated. The guy at Valve said he couldn't get them to stop selling the broken game, but he'd bring it up when he got the chance. (Last I checked, Steam no longer sells Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines or Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, so apparently SOMEBODY got something through the red tape.)
That's my happyish ending. "ish" because I wanted to play those games :(
Things I left out: The reception voice mailbox at Eidos HQ was always full. I tried calling other people at Eidos (whose direct numbers are readily available online), including their VP of marketing, and I left messages on their machines since they never answer their phones, but I never received a reply. At one point I sent Gabe Newell at Valve an e-mail, and never got a reply, though honestly I didn't expect one. I sent the Consumerist an e-mail about it, but even I'll admit it's not interesting enough for them to pick up the story.
Anyway, most of you are going to say TL;DR, but if you read the whole thing, I'll buy you a cookie if we ever meet in person.
@nat42 said:
One of the applications I support has non-unique primary keys;
Then they're not really primary keys... a PRIMARY KEY in SQL is implicitly UNIQUE.
I've noticed that the RSS reader on iGoogle has issues with all sorts of characters. Sometimes it just leaves things like "&" the way they are, and sometimes it breaks entirely...
I worked in an L-shaped building where each "wing" of the L had its own independent temperature controls. One wing held four offices, the kitchen, and the server room (i.e. a repurposed large meeting room, a WTF in its own right), and the temperature was thus turned all the way down. The other wing held two occupied offices, the meeting room, the bathroom, and three unoccupied offices. The temperature on that wing (where my office was located) was kept relatively warm.
The boss's office was the coldest - right next to the A/C units outside, I'm sure. He wore sweaters to work even in the dead of summer. In the winter, he wore two sweaters, because the A/C was on in that wing even in the winter.
So I would be in my office, nice and cozy, wearing short sleeve shirts (in the summer) or just a long-sleeve shirt (in the winter). I'd go to the boss's office and literally shiver while talking to him, whether it was summer or winter. I didn't really want to bring a coat just for the five minutes a day I had to spend in his office...
No kidding, blakeyrat. This week has been brutal. What's worse, my fan died a few weeks ago, so I didn't even have that luxury.
Wow, that sucks. I feel for you.
My problems aren't quite so severe... I got an e-mail yesterday saying "I need you to meet with X tomorrow to take over their production system by this weekend." It doesn't look too complicated, but I don't want to get my hopes up...
@jmucchiello said:
Isn't the TRWTF here that he's asking for help on a website devoted to laughing at others' stupidity?
No, he didn't ask for help. He specifically stated that he just stayed up all night fixing the problem, thus implying that he has already fixed it. He's simply sharing the stupidity with us.