I love the inherent WTFiness about the phrase "one concurrent user" ;-)
Posts made by ithika
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RE: The registration system - Part 1
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RE: Yet another Microsoft vs Apple
[quote user="Iago"]
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.
[/quote]
Ah, "never mind the quality, feel the width"? I don't think anyone here cares how many versions of Windows or Office have been released. The fact that gets in everyone's craw is that Microsoft manage to dominate many markets with second-rate products.
You are the only one who brought Apple back into the discussion. Personally I don't think they're much better.
[quote user="Iago"]
Funny how the Apple fanatics seem to gloss over that. Seems some people just aren't interested in evaluating the competition fairly.
[/quote]
Some of us have evaluated the competition and come to the conclusion that it's all shite. Take your corporate apologetics and get out of here. Come back when you're willing to talk about the technology.
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RE: Non-WTF job is really WTF!
[quote user="Alex Papadimoulis"]
While I appreciate your concern, all of the points you’ve made are highly opinionated and have little factual basis. Couldn’t a Linux zealot say similarly subjective things about Microsoft (“convicted monopolist”)? Or an Oracle-Hater (like myself) say bad things about Oracle (“they’re fricken’ Oracle!”)?
[/quote]
I get the distinct impression you haven't been reading any of the extensive literature on the matter.
- Diebold motherboards crash when user clicks "vote".
- Security analysis of Diebold voting machine.
- Diebold responds to analysis and completely misses the point of all accusations.
- Key from VAX computer cabinet opens Diebold voting machines.
This is just a small list, gleaned from only one security analyst's website, on the subject of only Diebold's voting machines. I ignored all the other electronic voting machine manufacturers not because they're any better but because, quite frankly, no more fuel is needed on this fire.
From what I have read about Diebold's software, it should have been on the front page long before now. Hard-coded secret keys released on public FTP servers. Using DES (not even 3DES) as their "ultra-secure" encryption algorithm. Using pseudorandom number generators which have been specifically cited as unsuitable for use in cryptography for exactly that purpose. The list of flaws is long and disgraceful.
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RE: Hugs error messages
I've never had any problems decoding GHC(i)'s error messages. You might want to try that instead.
Using GHCi to create a similar error I get:
<font face="Courier New"><font face="Arial">Prelude> let f = (head . map (\x -> xx)
<interactive>:1:31 parse error (possibly incorrect indentation)
Prelude> let f = (head . map (\x -> xx))
Prelude></font>
</font>
It's not completely obvious from the message that it's a ')' that's missing, but at least it doesn't have you searching away for a semi-colon that isn't even there!
What I find more annoying is that, because I write my code in literate Haskell, the parser always gives me line numbers that are 1 out from the line it's referring to. You get used to it after a while (especially if you're searching for a problem in the context of a whole function) but it's alarming at first. -
RE: Car repair "specialist" WTF
@Iago said:
And a quick note for American readers: an Imperial pint is 20 oz, not 16 oz like an American pint.
Let's hope that an Imperial fluid ounce is the same as an American one, or we will be here all night.
(Seriously though, 16oz? Surely your pint glasses must be tiny? Or do you not have pint glasses? I've only been to the States when I was decidedly under age.)
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RE: Car repair "specialist" WTF
@tster said:
that's silly. are you guys trying to switch to metric?
Even better - officially we already have! :-) It's just that there is so much 'legacy' that no-one can be bothered with the expense. Speed limit signs are in miles per hour, not kilometres, but we weigh everything in kilos and measure distances in metres. Except for road distances.
Don't try to wrap your head around it: it's not worth it. The rule of thumbe seems to be that if it involves motor vehicles then it's Imperial, else Metric.
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RE: We don't need no stinking abs.
These posts appear all the time here. The 'Classic' WTFs, you might call them. They seem to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the task at hand:
- What a random number generator is, and how it differs from a pseudo-RNG;
- Sub-classing of built-in objects to "add" functionality;
- Graceful degradation, using a software pRNG if /dev/random isn't available
And yet at the very bottom level, the level of line-by-line implementation, something really bloomin' funny happens. But can anyone explain why it happens? Is it a case of separation of architecture and implementation? Is it just that someone who knows (something about) what they're doing designs the skeleton, and then the idiots fill in the blanks?
Or is there something subtler than that? I'm not a professional coder and I've never worked on any multi-person projects with any scope. Can someone who's met these things first hand explain how it happens?
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RE: The amazing error trap
@dhromed said:
You know how simple things sometimes elude comprehension by the human brain?
Vroomfondel: Now that's what I call thinking. How come we can't think like Majikthise?
Majikthise: Maybe our minds are... too highly trained.
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RE: Dev server? We don't need no stinkin' dev server!
I'm guessing it's a trick question. There is no dev file, just like there's no spoon. You guys do all your dev work in public... the engineering equivalent of designing the upstairs as soon as you've finished building the ground level :-)
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RE: What The Flib
@stannius said:
What's a flib?
I think it's pronounced WTF lib - as in, a library of WTF functions. That's how I read it anyway.
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RE: Adobe Acrobat Sucks
@Rodyland said:
If you get rid of a heap of the plugins in the plug_ins
directory. Can't remember exactly which ones you can do without
(google is your friend), but only about 4 of them are actually needed
to run.
If you think about it, that doesn't even make sense. They're called "plugins" not "core components". By right you should be able to remove them all and have it load fine. I really don't care if I lose animating Javascript features. I only use the text search feature on one PDF in twenty or something.
It's complete feature creep and, as the OP hinted, an attempt to turn a commodity item into a brand by adding meaningless "value".
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RE: "Virtualization" versus "Enterprise"
It takes real skill to implement a virtualisation system... any idiot can over-use XML! :-D
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RE: Happy Easter to all
@Edgar Plonk said:
Ticketing somebody for driving at 72 mph on a highway is a WTF as well.
Not inconceivable that it was a 60mph zone. I dunno what NZ traffic laws are like.
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RE: Just incase voting for anything else might work
They were apparently using the Slashdot poll software... but removed the disclaimer about the results not being meaningful :-)
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RE: Initially no salary ~ Full time ~ Need full Commitment!!!
I assume "1 Programmer / Network" is pronounced "one programmer per network". And they have lots of networks maybe, and consequently lots of internets. Whee!
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RE: W2.0
@ammoQ said:
And exactly which of these features are supposed to be new?
Not necessarily new, just standardised now. People have been using DHTML for a good while now, but as a proper technology it couldn't really take off until browser DOMs were all standard.
Sometimes agreeing that the way 90% of people are doing things is the best way is good for everyone. The remaining 10% who are trying to do something stupid (or being told to reinvent the wheel by their bosses) can fix on a proper way of approaching the problem; and newcomers can latch onto the name. Even having a name is one step forward.
This all presupposes that there is a name and a definition. The latter isn't really the case (yet) for Web 2.0, but at least people can say some things that aren't Web 2.0. Use of the [font] tag, for example. :-)
Javascript or Flash navigation. The things which make usability experts gag!
Anyway, my tuppeny worth.
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RE: Solving Sudoku with SQL
@ammoQ said:
Most Sudokus (especially the easy and medium difficult ones) can be solved without backtracking.
All sudoku should be solvable without backtracking. With enough intelligence the solution should be entirely deterministic. However, in some instances there is no unique solution. I've done some that get down to four squares which are all mutually dependent. For each square the only option was to choose one at random because they all worked. Hence no unique solution and thus the last step just has to be a leap of faith.
But I understand that "proper" sudoku should only have one solution.
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RE: Solving Sudoku with SQL
Hehe, that's quite painful in theory but in practice - I love it! It takes a special kind of mind to think up something like that though. And it's probably the kind of mind that could do real harm with a little less knowledge...
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RE: HTML -> PHP Converter
@Nand said:
To give them a tiny bit of credit, however, they do claim to support SHTML -> php conversion, which is at least somewhat useful. I suspect it may replace #exec and #include directives with apropriate PHP code.
How much credit is "a tiny bit"... considering they appear to be selling a PHP placebo in a shiny box and deserve some retribution, I don't feel much sympathy for their position. Cowboy programmers, consultants, snake-oil salesmen, whatever you want to call them they make everyone else look bad.
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RE: Heavily typed
@Goplat said:
Type inference makes it annoying to track down the source of a type error. If you do
A x = func_returning_B(); a explicitly typed language can see the error
right there, but an implicitly typed language will assume that x was
supposed to be a B and the error will appear to be later in the code
when x is used in the manner befitting an A, so to fix it you first
have to go up and find x's initialization.
I don't see how type inference is inferior here. If I have two functions f and g whose types don't agree, like the following
f x = x + 5
g x = x ++ "!"
then it's fairly apparent that g . f will choke, since f returns an integer and g expects a string. Any type inference system should identify the disparity between what f implies about g, and what g implies about f.
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RE: Bet you've never seen THIS in bash
That shows an ingenuity and balls of steel that not many programmers would commit to... however, that hardly excuses the fact that they're using bash to perform decimal calculations!! Why was this solution the best available? Where was bc?
What kind of stripped down environment could this be running in that it didn't have any program with the facility to do non-integer arithmetic? -
RE: Heavily typed
@bonfyre said:
@El Foo said:
These redundant type messages carry weight, and the longer a program is, the more needless mass there is, so C# is 'heavily' typed, compared to 'lightly' typed languages (Haskell, OCaml, etc), or 'featherweight' typed languages (scripting languages - no type declarations at all!).
errr.... OCaml is strongly typed.
I think his point was that languages like *ML and Haskell have less need for explicit typing because they use type inference heavily. Java and C#, on the other hand, need lots of information which should be obvious from context.
So while Haskell and OCaml are strongly typed they are not heavily typed (for this new definition of 'heavy typing').
This is my first post on TDWTF, so I shall now perform a small prayer and hope not to look like an idiot when I hit post :-)