@Xyro said:
Edit: It just occurred to me, %pixel will be interpolated by Perl as a hash which will be coerced into a scalar.
No, Perl doesn't interpolate hashes.
@Xyro said:
Edit: It just occurred to me, %pixel will be interpolated by Perl as a hash which will be coerced into a scalar.
No, Perl doesn't interpolate hashes.
@boomzilla said:
You mean in the sensible world. How many times has that simple little change broken all sorts of stuff.There is such a thing as a happy medium. Changing random things because you feel like it is stupid, but so is becoming ossified because you're so risk-averse that you daren't even change the text of a comment in case the compiler turns out to have a really weird bug that causes code to break just because its byte offset in the file has changed.
Risk should be managed, not blindly avoided. That means you need process, sure - but that process needs to be more than a big rubber stamp that says "Denied".
Yeah, the software's kind of buggy like that. Last year I had a problem where the truthful answer to a certain question was £0.00, but it wouldn't accept that value. Eventually I called their helpline who told me it was a known issue (the official workaround was to put in £1.00 and then explain why in the "extra information" section).
But enough of this serious chit-chat. The real WTF is that you're doing your tax return in April. Why aren't you waiting till January 29th like a normal person?
Baby Jesus has run out of tears and is now sobbing gently into his vodka glass.
"Not the first thing that pops into Chahk's mind" != "not the first thing that pops into the minds of their targetted customer base".
I too am a gadget-hungry geek, but the first thing that pops into my mind when I see "S9 O2 L3" is science, not acronyms.
Does all the text really have a pale outline, or is it just that your camera is "helpfully" trying to "enhance" the picture?
(These haloes and suchlike are painfully common these days. Most people seem not to notice them, but once you start, you'll see them everywhere. Particularly on TV.)
TRWTF is machine translation. I have yet to see an example where it even allows you to get the gist of the foreign text. Occasionally it manages to help you identify the subject, but then you can generally do that by looking at the pictures anyway...
As a developer, I usually think it's a tad stupid when a site uses JS for stuff that doesn't need it, but it doesn't really fill me with rage.
Depends on the "stuff". The idiots who use JS to implement hyperlinks deserve to be tortured slowly to death in public.
for (; n != 0; n /= 2)
This is far too complicated for maintainance programmers to understand. What's wrong with do ... while (n /= 2)
?
And using an int returning values of 1 and 0 would save a whole load of characters. Really, I don't know how your company can afford to retain people like you who insist on filling up the punched cards with all this verbosity.
@MarcB said:
Notice also that they're connecting to the DB as 'root'.Not just that... look at the minimized Konsole window. They're running their entire Linux desktop as root!
If this was Slashdot, by now at least eight people would have accused Microsoft of posting crap like this to try and make LAMP look like an amateurish and inherently insecure choice.
@emurphy said:
How the hell can someone use Perl in any non-WTF fashionHold on there, I think you just answered your own question.
@seaturnip said:
What, both of you?Uh, okay, but those of us who work in sane, well-managed companies can and should keep using them.
@seaturnip said:
@dlikhten said:Yup. I remember when I first used OS X, I was forced to buy a new printer because my existing printer (that worked fine with OS 9) didn't work with OS X.When seeing the new Mac VS PC "If your printer does not work with windows Vista, buy a new printer... Ask not what windows vista can do for you but what you can do for windows vista"
That's rich, coming from Apple. Mac OS has a horrible record on backwards compatibility.
The irony is killing me.
There are places in America that only take cash? Dear me, how positively 19th-century! I'd heard that the place was becoming a bit of a tech backwater, but that's really taking things a bit far.
@Eve Teschlemacher said:
Now imagine a more complicated query, in which the user wants to filter or report on multiple different codes. Every table you have to join in makes the query take that much longer to type, not to mention the time needed to look at the database spec to figure out how the tables are related so that you know how to structure the join and what all the names of the foreign keys are.Does the phrase CREATE VIEW mean anything to you?
@Jetts said:
They are just doing what is cheapest for them. The costs of providing hand-holding-support for the many people who can't or don't want to read/follow instructions would be huge.
And the cost of the massive and increasing levels of fraud caused by insecure online banking is [i]not[/i] huge?
I love the scrolling message across the top, which proudly explains that the site was made with FrontPage, and goes on to detail (very slowly) exactly what won't work in browsers other than IE6 at 800x600 with font size set to "medium".
I hope the person who perpetrated this monstrosity has done the honourable thing to atone for his crime.
@dhromed said:
It's like Windows ME all over again. Half the people loved itThat statement is the WTF of the day. I never met [i]anyone[/i] who loved Windows ME. At least Vista works half the time... ME was just broken.
Sorry, but no. It is not valid English. There is a simple test to determine whether something is valid English or not, and this sentence fails it. The test is this: [i]would any native speaker of the language ever say this in the honest belief that they were speaking correctly?[/i] And this sentence fails horribly. No native speaker could ever come out with broken English like that and believe that they were uttering valid English. Therefore, it is not valid English, QED.
The secondary WTF is that Word objects to the passive voice in the first place...
I still build my main computers from parts. Why? Well, because I'm going to have to spend hours getting the thing into a usable shape whichever route I take - either putting it together from parts, or laboriously removing all the crapware, shovelware, and so on that places like Dell stuff their computers full of.
Choosing parts and fiddling with hardware is fun. Wrestling with Dell's website and removing Symantec malware is not fun. Therefore, I build from parts. :)
@SenorLapiz said:
Every time I run into something that's a little non-obvious on the computer (and this can happen in Windows, Linux, on the Mac...), I think to myself, "how would my mom have ever figured that out?".
Every time anyone says something that suggests they think computers should be easy for everyone to use, I think to myself, "why do we make this unrealistic assumption?"
These are the most complicated and sophisticated tools our civilisation has ever produced, and we expect people without a shred of technical aptitude to be able not only to use them in straightforward ways, but to be able to configure them from scratch, do arbitrarily complicated things with them, and fix them when they go wrong!
Some people jocularly refer to code that's written in C++ but uses an excessive number of C idioms as "C+".(You know the kind of thing - stdio instead of iostreams, char* instead of a string class, C arrays instead of STL containers, dumb pointers everywhere instead of references or smart pointers, no RAII...)
And that "play-hookey" page is hilarious. Javascript "an interpreted version of Java"? Perl "very similar to C"? WTF?
Hey, you can't just move on - this is teh interwebs dammit, at a [i]bare minimum[/i] one of you now has to either (a) call the other a moron, or (b) compare him to Hitler.
Sadly, the reality is that PHP is [b]not[/b] easy for idiots to get working. They just think it will be, and maybe they manage to get it kind of half working most of the time...
@kirchhoff said:
The lone exception is slashdot. This is because they actually know what they're doing, and have been around the longest
I was about to point out that there are loads of forums that use proper HTML for user comments - perlmonks, for example, is another that's been around for donkey's years and has a decent comment system.
Then I noticed that I was having to use real HTML here, in this very post, because that's the only way I can find of putting a line break between paragraphs. Hmm, maybe it's not such a rare feature after all.
Why doesn't the government pay somebody to write a Linux version? For one thing, I don't want my fucking tax money going toward development of a program which allows a CONVICTED CRIMINAL to use the operating system he finds most convenient.
If he was allowed out of the house but the government wanted to track his movements with a device fitted to his car, and he owned a Ford but the government device only fitted Chevys, would you think it was reasonable to demand that he buy a Chevy? Wait, don't stop reading - this isn't the usual car analogy.
I have no problems with the government monitoring the online activities of convicted criminals. Seems perfectly reasonable: you get caught pirating movies (abusing your privacy online for personal gain), you forfeit the right to privacy online. Fine.
The problem is their entire approach -- that they're trying to do this at the computer level in the first place, where he could trivially bypass the checks just by using a LiveCD, and probably get away with it too. But all his online activity goes through his ISP, so why the hell don't they (a) ban him from using encrypted protocols, and (b) get his ISP to forward logs of all his online activity to them? It takes away a whole load of problems. As it stands, they're basically going to have to get his ISP to monitor his activities anyway or they won't know if he [i]is[/i] using a LiveCD, so either the "punishment" is hopelessly insecure, or this whole Windows software thing is just a waste of everyone's time.
To return to the car analogy, this is like trying to track someone's movements by fitting a device to his car, when they should be putting it on his ankle instead: no problem if he's got a different make of car, and it stops him just taking the bus instead. You shouldn't be saying "he's a criminal, they could have banned him from driving altogether, it's reasonable to say that if he wants to drive then he should get a Chevy" -- you should be saying "why the hell are they wasting money on car tracking devices in the first place?"
In short, the government has ALREADY wasted your fucking tax money by paying someone to write Windows tracking software in the first place, when all ISPs already keep suitable logs that contain all the information they could possibly want.
The real WTF is why everybody thinks this is somehow a violation of his rights. The judge could have simply thrown him in the slammer instead.
Yeah, or just had him summarily executed. But I like to think we live in a free society governed by the rule of law, where one principle of justice is that punishments are proportionate to their crimes. He's already done his time in jail, and now the remainder of his punishment is the forfeiture of his online privacy. Which is just and proper -- the only problem is how it's being implemented, which is stupid.
@too_many_usernames said:
I'm not sure I can see why a C equivalent would be more difficult; it would probably just look like if (exists(param0)) or something like that - with a helpful name.
BZZZT! Wrong. The standard way to do this in C is in fact
#include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/stat.h> #include <unistd.h> int exists(const char* filename) { struct stat buf; if (stat(filename, &buf) != 0) { return 0; } return 1; }
Yeah, I love intuitive names like "stat".
And this is simplifying matters somewhat, as the stat() call may fail for other reasons than the file not existing. To be sure that we have a bona-fide case of a file not existing, we would need to check whether the value of errno is ENOENT or not. How intuitive!
Yes, there [i]are[/i] languages that have better-designed libraries than Perl, but I honestly think it's a bit rich for you to pick C of all languages for your example. :)
@Devi said:
@joe.edwards@imaginuity.com said:Allow me to introduce you to the concept of "quotation marks", can be conveniently used to work round this exact issue.You can send directly to the current response output stream, no temporary files required. The work to output proper CSV is negligible. This is just lazy.
Assuming you can find delimiter characters that aren't valid parts of the spreadsheet's data. If some of the fields contain plain test then CSV could be a real pain to sort out...
Despite all the hate being dished out in this thread, there's nothing wrong with CSV if you specify what style you're using. It's far less bloated than HTML or the hideous clusterfuck that is Office Broken XML, and also has the advantage that far more people can read and write it.
@dubbreak said:
IE 7 won't be rolling out where I contract for years (gov agency). They'll hold onto XP until they can't get licenses.A government agency that's using XP? Yeah, right. Even the really quick-moving ones have only just finished replacing NT4 with 2k...
@ammoQ said:
Well, this requirement really makes it a bit harder to create dozens of fake accounts.Yes, it's probably quite an effective anti-trolling mechanism.
Unfortunately, like all effective anti-trolling mechanisms, it's also a very effective anti-participation mechanism. They may not get many trolls, but they will also be missing out on a significant number of genuine would-be participants who would have real contributions to make to the community, but refuse to jump through hoops like that just to join one web forum.
So the only vaguely WTF-like thing about this is that they seem to have taken CAPTCHA measures well beyond what most people would think reasonable.
@Atrophy said:
The weird part is that ODF is also just the internal representation of the document dumped into an arbitrary XML candy coating.That would be weird if it was true, but it isn't.
@Atrophy said:
I think it's high time someone made a document format that was just XML and nothing else ... like thisThere are plenty. HTML springs to mind, or DocBook. They all have the problem that what [i]users[/i] want is a document where they can control the actual layout easily, and the only way to get that is to have a rich markup language that allows you to specify a lot of complicated detail that isn't directly connected to the semantics of the document.
Because that's what this forum is for!
It does NOTHING to increase security. Nothing at all. Anyone who is remotely interested in stealing your precious content already knows the many trivial ways round this kind of thing.
All it does is drive less tech-savvy people away, because it makes your website feel "broken" because it behaves wrongly. Someone who might have visited your site regularly, giving you dozens or even hundreds of ad views, will instead only visit ONCE, giving you ONE ad view, then NEVER COME BACK, because they hated the horrible experience of having an ad shoved in their face when all they did was right-click to try and send a link to your site to a friend.
@mrprogguy said:
What do you suggest using if you want to pull a longer substring out of a string? Multiple String.charAt()s and concatenate the results? Regular expressions?Just a caution: String.substr is junk and should never be used. If you want to pull a single character out of a string, use String.charAt().
OpenOffice's macro support sucks, though. (Or rather, the support is probably great, but the documentation is so useless that it's impossible to use.)
Say what you like about VBA-driven Excel worksheets, but you must admit that half our economy relies on them, so they can't be entirely bad!
(I speak as someone who tried to switch completely to Linux at home, then gave up and started using Excel in Wine, because while Excel is frustrating, no free alternative can touch it.)
Open Source is often bad programming because the first one out with something gets the kudos.This is false.
And, let's be honest, good programming takes time.There are limits. I get programs finished a LOT quicker when I indent my source code and include error messages that - while maybe not brilliantly helpful to anyone other than myself - do at least distinguish between different errors.
So, by the time you get something out that is good code, people have already jumped on the next new thing.This is false.
I especially find it ironic that open source is anti-MS,This is false.
but as an industry it nearly follow the same model of getting attention - release first no matter what.When was the last time Microsoft released anything first?
The only difference is that everyone gets to see your absolutely shitty code.The only difference apart from the other billion differences, you mean.
At least MS hides all their crap from us.Apart from the large quantities of code they make public through various shared source schemes.
So, uh, you've managed to make an authoritative-sounding and opinionated post in which not one single claim was accurate. Impressive. Had you considered becoming a journalist or a politician?
@emurphy said:
@PSWorx said:Um, there are probably more users in the world who find the American date format totally incomprehensible than who are used to it. It's not a case of being "picky", it's a case of expecting an application to work for the user, not the other way round.I believe the focus is more on not taking knowledge of technical terms for granted (like the phpBB "help" message "the syntax of this field is the same as in php's date() function")
phpBB hyperlinks "date()" to the relevant section of the PHP manual. The only thing it takes for granted is that the subset of users who are both (1) picky enough to want a custom date format, and (2) unable and/or unwilling to RTFM, is small enough not to worry about.
A good interface here would have had predefined options for "Month-Day-Year", "Day-Month-Year", and "Year-Month-Day", and an "Other" option that revealed the underlying editable format string. Advanced functionality tucked away where only advanced users will see it, and common functionality provided in a way that common users can use easily.
The real WTF is the actual, uh, what for want of a better word I shall charitably call the "content" of that page. As in, the things they think are going to make me speechless.
One of the highlights, at #9 in the list, is the fact that Windows Vista supports wireless networking.
I'm speechless.
WHAT PARALLEL UNIVERSE DO YOU COME FROM WHERE TELEGRAMS CAN CONTAIN LOWER CASE LETTERS QUERY
@GeneWitch said:
Ugh, i feel like i have to go shower after that site you linked from pop-upd, pop-undered, and tried to hijack. use photobucket if imageshack is down.
What are "pop-ups" and "pop-unders"? And what exactly could a web page "hijack"?
Grief, next you'll be telling me crazy things like "web pages have adverts on them" and "computers are vulnerable to viruses and malware".
The real WTF is that people still use primitive technology like Internet Explorer and Windows...
@The Vicar said:
Yes, but grammatically, it would still be "die roll", even if more than one die is involved. It's still "human error", not "humans error", no matter how many programmers were involved in a WTF.Maybe, but you're forgetting that in standard vernacular English the singular of "dice" is "dice". And before you start whining about idiots who don't know better than to use incorrect backformations, consider for a moment whether you're 'smart' enough to use "pease" as a singular (instead of the incorrect backformation "pea")...
@SpoonMeiser said:
For example, I find the dark ages very interesting, or the crusades. What notable person from those periods should I pick?
The obvious approach would be to state which periods of history you're interested in, and then identify one or two of the prominent figures with a "for example" and a summary of why that person stands out to you from the generally interesting period.
Plenty of choices. For the Dark Ages you have the likes of Alfred the Great or Charlemagne, who brought political stability to portions of the fractured Roman Empire, setting up the foundations of modern Europe, and who also promoted literacy and education at a time where most modern people seem to think nobody really cared about such things (Alfred's campaign to promote literacy in English was centuries ahead of its time). For the crusades, well, you have the old storybook favourites like Saladin or Richard Lionheart - their mythologisation by subsequent historians is fascinating - or you could pick on the role of the various Popes, or on controversial military leaders like Peter of Cyprus (the cynical sack of Alexandria is a great example of where the Crusades went totally wrong).
The only way you could really go wrong would be to claim to be interested in those periods and then be unable to identify a notable person to describe. ;)
What constitutes a wrong answer? Well, for example, just saying "Bach" would be wrong. It's an [i]interview[/i] question; one-word answers are [i]automatically[/i] wrong. The interviewer is not asking because s/he is interested in your favourite person in history: s/he is asking because s/he wants you to demonstrate your ability to identify what makes you interested in that person and present a concise argument in favour of that person being worth studying, which will give him/her an insight into your thought processes.
For example, let's consider the case where the candidate is interested in Hitler. Merely admitting to an interest in Hitler cannot be wrong (if it is, then the candidate is better off not working for a stupid boss). What makes the answer right or wrong is [i]why[/i] the candidate picked Hitler. If they answer "Hitler, because he nearly got rid of all those goddamn Jews and cripples and faggots", obviously that's a no-brainer No Hire. But if they answer something along the lines of "Hitler, because he presents so many interesting questions about leadership and human nature - it's fascinating reading all the different opinions about what motivated him and why he made the decisions he did, and there are important lessons for us to learn from the way he managed to convince so many people to support a policy of mass murder. I really enjoy investigating complex problems like that, and trying to piece together all the contradictory evidence to come up with consistent theories", then clearly that's a different matter altogether.
(Indeed, I would have thought that a candidate who admitted to being fascinated with Hitler would be ideally qualified to take on a job maintaining a COBOL behemoth...)
@TehPenguin said:
Prizes to the first that can figure out what the heck it does :P
Duh, obviously it prints "Just another JavaScript hacker" to stdout.
I have a fully updated version of Firefox on this Ubuntu PC, and it damn well does have such a thing.
Edit->Preferences..., Advanced, General, and make sure you didn't uncheck the "Check spelling as I type" box. If that is checked, try right-clicking on a text area and make sure "Spell check this field" is checked. If it is, check that you actually have some dictionaries installed (right click on text area -> Dictionaries).
[quote user="powerlord"][quote user="bob the dingo"]same here... we go through and design a site based on these things called "standards." then we go back through and see how much is broken in IE and hack the hell out of the code to get it to look quasi-right there.
[/quote]
and then you find out that things like <img usemap="idname"> and <col align="center"> are broken in Firefox, but not IE or Opera.
[/quote]
OK, so IE is totally broken in fundamental ways, but that's OK because Firefox has minor niggles on a couple of extremely rare features with trivial workarounds? Ri-i-i-ight, I'm like really seeing your logic there, know what I mean?
(The usemap one is ludicrous to cite as a Firefox shortcoming. The standards-compliant XHTML 1.0 code is <img usemap="#idname">. <img usemap="idname"> is XHTML 1.1, and works fine when you serve the content as XHTML... but you can't do that because Internet Explorer is broken. I'll grant you that Firefox's handling of <col> is a genuine issue, but I'm hard pressed to see it as a big problem, largely because I've never wanted to use <col> in my life.)
[quote user="AustinW"]Remember when you were in high school and your teacher blew so much smoke up your ass about what each book meant and if you didn't get the smallest details correct on the test then you got a bad grade? [/quote]
No. Then again, my country has a decent educational system with competent teachers who actually encourage students to think for themselves. Oh, they told us what they thought books meant, sure, but they didn't insist we agree, or test us on that - they tested us on whether we could support our own own opinions with reasoned arguments.
[quote user="AustinW"]Ernest Hemingway himself proved all that was a load of BS[/quote]
No he didn't. That's the intentional fallacy - the lie that authors have a monopoly on interpreting their work, the lie that you can understand anything if you only know what the author meant when s/he wrote it. That, of course, is just as much BS as the claim that some critic's interpretation is right. The only meaning a book has is the meaning you create for yourself as you read it.
[quote user="AustinW"]This is the kind of thing people should be taught. To think for themselves and get out of a story what you see in it, rather than what some teacher or critic tells you you should see...[/quote]
And see, you've come to the exact same conclusion yourself!
It's just a shame that your country's educational system doesn't encourage that kind of thing. I suspect we'd see a whole lot fewer WTFs here if it did...
A better approach would be to write a single function that can be used for any number of cases. Passing the arguments as a list is one way to achieve this. (For example, you might use the "nub" function to remove duplicate elements from the list, then compare its length before and after to count the number of equal values that were removed.)
Then your functions above would be defined simply as
howManyEqual a b c = howManyOfListEqual [a, b, c]
howManyOfTwoEqual a b = howManyOfListEqual [a, b]
and so on. This gets you the code reuse without relying on hard-coded special cases or ugliness as you are. :)
Yeah, so, wake me up when Apple releases a tablet product, or when you can run OS X on embedded devices. Apple have a better desktop OS, but that's basically all they have (ignoring the iPod, which is just a media player), while Microsoft's product line is really quite diverse.
Funny how the Apple fanatics seem to gloss over that. Seems some people just aren't interested in evaluating the competition fairly.
[quote user="djork"]
[/quote]
Well... yes, actually, many of them do. Since you ask.
Just because the building dates from the 12th century doesn't mean the chef does too.
[quote user="HeroreV"]
The Wii only supports 480i and 480p.[/quote]
Not the point. The point is that the PS brand is known for providing games with powerful graphics (like the XBox brand) and games with weaker graphics but innovative gameplay (like Nintendo's consoles). Since you can get a 360 and a Wii for the price of a PS3, and the 360 will provide for all your beautiful FPS and RPG needs while the Wii will give you all the innovative gameplay, the combination is a viable alternative to a PS3.
[quote user="HeroreV"]I wouldn't be surprised if a later firmware revision allowed the PS3 to scale 720p to 1080i anyway.
[/quote]
True. Also, perhaps by the time the firmware is updated the console will be available to those willing to pay less than $10,000 on eBay. That'll be exciting.