@Iago said:
when you put an entry in Microsoft or Apple's bug trac--OH WAIT YOU CAN'T
Trolling blakey? https://connect.microsoft.com/ says it's that, or just another ignorant fanboy.
@Iago said:
when you put an entry in Microsoft or Apple's bug trac--OH WAIT YOU CAN'T
Trolling blakey? https://connect.microsoft.com/ says it's that, or just another ignorant fanboy.
@blakeyrat said:
@MascarponeRun said:My point was really that, no, it's much, much harder than that. MS, with all the billions of dollars they spend on it are barely above awful, and since there doesn't seem to be a simple set of guidelines to follow, everyone else is even worse. Amateurs are always hopeless.Who here knows even such basic UI design stuff as, say, the first three places on the screen most people look at?The real problem is programmers who don't read TheDailyWTF, or participate in community forums. I'm sure any GUI app written by this crowd would be way above average, simply because this crowd is full of people who give a shit.
I'd have expected you of all people to agree with me that the best UI design today is roughly equivalent, in developmental terms, to the Wright Flyer.
It actually sounds to me like they did about the right thing, process-wise - told you the upgrades weren't compatible, provided an option to download and install compatible versions. No problem there. Evidently, though, they managed to make the user-interface so bad that the process was still annoying, and really this is the root of the issue. UI design is just so fucking embarrassingly bad that it hurts. MS work hard at it to some slight effect, but even they're pretty bad at this stage; the OS movement is completely hopeless, as are most commercial software houses who aren't MS. Unfortunately most UI stuff is still done by people who haven't the first clue what they're doing, and don't even realise they need to learn - but likely would be extremely defensive if anyone suggested that whatever language they code in could be picked up by a complete beginner paying scant attention, and would maybe point to a site like this one full of egregious errors made by those with no knowledge of the right way to do things. Who here knows even such basic UI design stuff as, say, the first three places on the screen most people look at?
So many things I see are as if a programmer has very proudly announced that his UI design is great because 'the users only have to click the OK button' but failed to realise that randomly placing that button in a 100 x 100 grid of identical, non-functional OK buttons makes his program hard to use.
@Spectre said:
How do you autofit a selection?Not sure if you're serious there. If you are... Oh sod it, just google it. Just to be clear, 'auto-fit' is a formatting term in Excel, not a statistical one.
@dohpaz42 said:
@blakeyrat said:It may be, but it may be for practical reasons as well. I used to know a guy who was fairly high up in McD's ops department over here, and from what I recall menu choices have a lot to do with the equipment available in the kitchens. Some items will, say, use the grill, need to be put in a bun/saladed/sauced, and others might need to be fried or microwaved or some such. They have to keep a resource budget in mind so they don't give the kitchens (say) too much to grill and too little to fry - which is a bit like playing Tetris. It may well be that the McRib is a menu-filler for times when there are only a couple of grill slots free in the resource budget, or something." I mean, for me, it's "why does McDonalds only offer the McRib for a short time every other year?"I can't resist, despite that question potentially being rhetorical. It's as simple as "artificial demand"
@da Doctah said:
@MascarponeRun said:
From my perspective, not knowing how to use basic Excel functions like, say, sorting, inserting a column, autofitting a selection, and so-on are such basics that not knowing how to do them, in a job which involves lots of Excel usage, is like not knowing how to read and write.It gets worse. How many times have you received a Word document asking for your updates, and when you make formatting codes visible you find that the author doesn't even know about tabs?
I have slightly more sympathy for that, because it's not necessarily obvious that such a thing as a tab should exist in typography - at least to me. If you don't know about tabs, then that's not a Word-specific problem. With the Excel users, though, the main cause of frustration is that they have no idea that Excel has all this advanced (ahem) functionality, so they never bother to look for another way to do things.
@too_many_usernames said:
To be fair, if you learn Excel really well you can do all those things without those problems -- but wouldn't :)Be careful... if they learn Excel too well, you'll get stuff like we have in our company.
Excel is the only tool we have for submitting travel requests, purchase requests, and things like inventory management.
It's really fun when you open the tool and get "<Your colleague> currently has the document open for editing. You can close it, or keep it open and wait for a notification when the lock is available."
@Renan said:
The politeness involved and the fun you extract when telling the other person to learn how to use Excel are like the kinect and potential energies in a closed system. They both sum up to a constant value, but the more you have of one of them, the less you have of the other.
Ah yes, that's the problem - sometimes the fun is too tempting :)
@Weng said:
Win-L: Saving the company those crucial 3 seconds of productive time before I head to the shitter to accomplish precisely nothing for a quarter hour.
Hey, those are the most only productive fifteen minutes of my day.
@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:WTF? You missed the most obvious interpretation, which is that the toddler ate the banana. Which brings up the question: Why is blakeyrat depraved beyond belief?Oh. Uh. No comment.
I guess I just assumed nobody would ever write a post here that wasn't at least a little sexual and/or depraved.
I think you meant to point out that from the banana's perspective, being eaten is incredibly violent, right? A common typo, the keys are like right next to each other.
From my perspective, not knowing how to use basic Excel functions like, say, sorting, inserting a column, autofitting a selection, and so-on are such basics that not knowing how to do them, in a job which involves lots of Excel usage, is like not knowing how to read and write. Not only is it immensely annoying for me to have to watch idiots fumble around, but they're actually so inefficient that if they took five minutes to learn some new basic technique using it would actually save them that much time in the next hour, let alone over days and weeks ahead.
I generally bite my tongue because (they're my managers and) I'm getting paid overtime to sit and wait for them to mess around, but also I worry that there's no good way to explain to your boss that he's wasted around a significant portion of his (very busy) day, every day, for years.
Is there a good way to raise the matter? Should I keep quiet? Overall I'm not annoyed enough to set them up and get them fired, so that's out. Am I just being intolerant?
@Anonymouse said:
What is a trailer?Got this in a mail from Rockstar yesterday:
11th of February?Aww...
For blakeyrant (everyone else probably has gotten the point already, so they can just skip the rest of the post): see, there's several different date formats in use around the world (a 'date' is a common designation of a point in 'time', based on - simply put - the number of rotations of the earth (the planet we all live on) around the sun (the big yellow glowy thing in the sky), and 'time' (being one of the dimensions of a construct called the 'space-time continuum') is commonly used to measure the sequence of events) and some people in a place called "Europe" use a format like "day.month.year" so that, for example the "11th of February 2011" would be written as "11.02.11", just like in the picture, whereas some people in another place called the "USA" would write that as "02/11/11" because they put the month first for some odd reason. Anyway, they probably meant to put the "2nd of November 2011" in the picture, but while using the "USA" ordering of the date fields they used the "Europe" style of separating them with "." instead of "/", so it looks like a european date and means something very much different. Now, isn't that funny? Ha Ha!
@blakeyrat said:
Look, whatever: obviously either the system is a gigantic piece of shit, because it's so complex nobody understands it, or the system is a gigantic piece of shit because the only people who can understand it are austism-spectrum disorders who can't speak fucking plain English.False dichotomy: actually, it's just so shit that I can't be bothered to explain it to you.
If I could be bothered, I'd probably say something about how it's completely understandable that you're confusing the bitcoin protocol/medium-of-exchange/transaction history/what-have-you with bitcoin-the-monetary-unit-based-on-kiddy-porn because that's exactly what the kiddyfiddlers do whenever they explain bitcoins. They are actually two different things, though.
Is it just me who's been noticing a trend recently towards job postings that are even more ludicrous than normal? I keep seeing things which are akin to advertising for a cleaner at minimum wage, with a note like 'in addition, must be a qualified and experienced cardiac surgeon'. The latest one I've seen was for junior 1st line support/sysadmin and required 'in addition, MUST have in-depth knowledge and experience in [...] database creation, modification & upkeep' - and offering a salary that's low for the support job, let alone being even in the same ballpark as what a qualified, experienced DBA expects.
Actually, on that note, does anyone know of any half-useful slave-traders in the UK that they'd recommend?
@Lorne Kates said:
Hint: It will be much more than before, because 1937 Spam Blvd., Austin, Minnesota, 55912 is going to be my new "You insist you need an address? Fine, shitcocker. Here's my address" address
Does your locality not have criminal obscenity laws relating to sending an envelope with offensive material on the outside? Whenever I'm forced to put an address, I add a few lines of disgusting racist bile, or some such. If anyone ever actually mails a letter to that address, they'd be committing a criminal offence.
I wonder if you can successfully sue for libel if a company sends you a letter to your name and address with 'is a paedophile/banker/some such' as address line 1.
@ochrist said:
Why the didn't just add the two jpg files and the written statement inside one zip file, I can't fathom!At a guess, they selected the files in Explorer, then used the right-click context menu option for 'compress and send to email recipient'. I often do much the same thing when I need to send someone two files - commonly, Excel workbooks - which I have open. It's quicker to hit Alt-F-D-A Ctrl-enter twice than to create a new mail and add both files as attachments, particularly if they're not saved in the root of My Docs or on the desktop.
I'm trying to understand if there's any inherent link between Bitcoin's concept of a new currency, and the system they've actually put in place, or if one could in fact store anything in a Bitcoin wallet - e.g US$.
@Matt Westwood said:
@da Doctah said:FTFY133377leeett?
@serguey123 said:
@Nagesh said:
sumtime it is beter to deliver quick system, than to do sumthing good and waste customer money and time.
Discus.
I'm not a sport fan
Maybe he meant disqus - because they're certainly everything he says.
@Justice said:
Where do you make the cutoff, though? And who decides that?Why shouldn't I? I note that many of the sites I'm complaining about want to secure my data for their benefit, not mine - so why should it be my problem?
@Justice said:
I don't mind websites wanting some kind of authentication, because most sites would probably rather not turn into 4chan. What I do mind is having to create a username and password and go through email verification just to be able to use the search function or view image attachments on Brad's Honda Civic Modification Hub, and then having to do it again on Tony's Honda Accord Customization Depot.
To be quite clear, I'm not suggesting that authentication is never needed, or that passwords are never the way to go. What I'm saying is that sometimes authentication is not necessary much or at all, and sometimes we should be considering other means of authentication apart from passwords. The example you offer is just the kind of thing I'm thinking of - it's clearly a problem, and to my mind the solution is that there's no need for the level of security that's being implemented there. Once sites like that ask for passwords, they have a duty to keep them secure. If they never asked for them in the first place, they don't need to worry as much. Bear in mind that on here, spammers often register accounts, so even that doesn't stop people completely.
@dhromed said:
I write a spider, spend an afternoon filling it up with usernames I see (or automate that process as well) , and send it off to all popular sites changing people's bios and profiles to spam linksThere's no reason why the profile-change url needs to be easily inferrable from username.
That said, I wasn't pretending to offer finished solutions, and certainly some things - Twitter, perhaps, email, and so-on - will still need password protection. My point is just that a lot of stuff doesn't.
@Justice said:
throwaway logins to esoteric forums that have some bit of information you want. You'll show up once, get what you need, and probably never visit the site again.I reckon something like 80%+ of the accounts I end up creating on the web have a password like 'password' and a mailinator.com email address.
@dhromed said:
Usernames?@MascarponeRun said:
It's plain that the answer is actually to stop requiring people to log-in the whole bloody time.How do you link prsonal items to users?
Like last.fm statistics or your tweets?
I'd go as far as to argue that even sites like this don't need passwords - honestly, if someone can impersonate, say, Blakey well enough that we can't spot it, does it matter? - but there's an easier case for a more moderate approach. Certainly, if I don't give two hoots about my - to use your example - last.fm data, there's no reason why I should be forced to set a password. Similarly, there are plenty of cases where there's nothing whatsoever worth protecting - smaller online shops are particularly guilty of this, often requiring creation of username/password just to store name and address details that could just as well reside in a cookie for all the difference it would make.
Just off the top of my head, we could also make use of stuff like unique links mailed to the registered email address for the account. If they're reasonably long then the chances of guessing one are slim, and the chances of guessing a specific one are pretty much zero. Of course, that's not far from how all those people who click the reset password link every time they visit a (rarely visited) site are already doing it.
I think the chap with the article had the right idea, which is realising that the problem is... passwords. WTF he thought the answer was therefore... passwords is quite beyond me.
It's plain that the answer is actually to stop requiring people to log-in the whole bloody time.
@pjt33 said:
When I was 17 I got some physical junk mail from a sofa company addressed to Mr and Mrs <my name here>. As no other spammer has attributed me with a non-existent spouse, I still haven't worked out where they got my address.I don't care if it's true or not: I've decided to believe that you were still living with your parents (and that you use their name) and TRWTF was that you thought the mail was addressed to you...
@C-Octothorpe said:
Bear in mind that it's pretty much only train geeks who'd be interested, plus a vanishingly small minority of people with genuinely unusual travel needs/wants. 99.99% of journeys - number pulled from my ass, probably significantly higher - won't need to refer to the routeing guide because they're either direct - one train, no changes - or via the shortest possible route. Basically, the routeing guide is usually only needed to answer a question about routeing where the first response is likely to be 'WTF would you want to do that in the first place?'Tell me there's an app for this and that they don't expect normal people to trudge through a fuck 1000+ page PDF document, right? Right?
@Elusive Pete said:
My university sent an interesting email to all staff this morning:
"Late on Friday afternoon we were made aware of a network issue which may have caused some Windows 7 PC’s to have their hard drives wiped. If you are reading this email your PC has not been affected, although you may have colleagues who are unable to access their PC. Staff using the Windows XP operating system is not impacted."I count 4 WTF's:
- In an institution with an anally-retentive security policy and Draconian firewall rules, an intrusion got through that could wipe disks with no apparent involvement from the user.
- Members of staff need to be told that "if your computer works then your disk wasn't wiped".
- The IT guys seem to have forgotten that many staff check emails from home or on mobile devices, so the email could easily be read by staff whose workstations were in fact affected.
And finally, WTF #4 is a tie: either it's the fact that the majority of the institution's workstations still run a 10-year-old OS, or the fact that said 10-year-old OS survived the intrusion better than the latest version.
Sorry, going to have to call you on that. WTF #1 is 'may have [...] their hard disk drives wiped' - don't they know/can't they tell? - closely followed by WTF #2: the sheer level of illiteracy displayed in that email. 'Staff... is not impacted'? 'Staff are not affected, perhaps.' Oh, and 'we were made aware of an issue'? An idiot can tell that's a prevarication of some kind, so why not just come clean and admit what the cockup was?
From time to time I've done a fair bit of work as a support manager and that kind of thing, and one of the things that drives me batshit crazy is the insistence of support monkeys on sending out poorly written, uninformative, frankly downright dishonest emails/notifications to users. It makes us look like complete idiots, and although, I have to admit, quite a lot of support workers are precisely that, we do try to project an image. I hope all my support drones know that if they pulled a stunt like that they'd get a formal reprimand at least.
@nexekho said:
@Master Chief said:May be easier just to go into display settings and switch primary and secondary monitors, then drag the windows/boxes to the shared edge of the screens.A note on monitors: 3ds max is both brilliant and retarded here. All of the pop up dialogs (materials, environment, render setup, etc.) all remember their location, which is very handy when you're using a secondary display to hold them like I do. However, if you happen to move or remove that display, the windows will still spawn outside your desktop area, and you have to edit an .ini file to get them back to their default position.I've had that one a number of times. If you can focus the window you can alt+space then hit M to move it with the arrow keys.
@mott555 said:
Yeah, properly throwaway. I find it works for somewhere around 90% of online sign-ups. The only problem is that if you forget your password, you quite often haven't a clue what email address you signed up with either.@MascarponeRun said:
@mott555 said:see: mailinator.comI have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.
So anybody can view any @mailinator.com mailbox on that site? Interesting.
Talking of mailinator, can anyone explain to me in very general terms how they do what they do with their DNS? If you go to http://somename.mailinator.com it automatically redirects to mailinator.com/somename (or some such). This is outside my field, and my DNS experience extends to sometimes having to set up separate www. and mail. dns records. Does all .mailinator.com traffic simply get directed to the malinator.com server for it to handle?
@Nagesh said:
Er, yes, but still... The Indian railway system is famous for being a massive employer, right? That perception may be slightly out of date, but it's based on the massive human-powered system which still, to the best of my knowledge, underpins the Indian railways. Online ticket sales is a bit like the wart on the elephant's back in that context.@MascarponeRun said:
That said, I've heard it described as a giant computer which uses people instead of electrons. The point, though, is correct - in that a system which still uses steam power and no computers really isn't much like a modern hi-tech rail system at all.Talk about having incorect information! You can meke booking on pasenger train from any where in the world.
Do you realy think that system is not computerised?
Please note that I say this as a massive fan - I'll be dreadfully disappointed if you tell me the stuff I've been watching and reading is out of date and it no longer works that way.
@mott555 said:
see: mailinator.comI have a Hotmail account too, though I use it as a throwaway email address because they seem to have the worst spam filter ever.
@Matt Westwood said:
@dhromed said:@DaveK said:
@FrostCat said:
@dhromed said:If you go down to the lab today you're sure of a big surprise.What if your bladder isn't brimmin'?
Then you don't go down to the lab right then.
Coz ev'ry bladder that ever there was will gather there for certain because
Today's the day the programmers get their piss nicked.
Oh, well done that man.
Recently I've been dealing with exactly the opposite problem: Excel phobia. At the moment I'm a subcontractor for a (very) large and well-known PC-builder supplying PCs to an equally large and well-known investment bank. For some reason, the entire project involves extensive usage of Excel instead of some sensible database-based system, and yet there is Excel-phobia to the extent that hidden columns in a spreadsheet cause ripples of panic to spread up and down multiple layers of panic management. (I sleep-typed 'panic' for management, but that's a Freudian-slip if ever there was one.) You simply wouldn't believe the amount of running-around-in-circles conditional formatting can cause, despite this being a site called 'the daily WTF' and me telling you that even by normal standards this is barely credible.
Witchcraft? The modern day equivalent is a macro, apparently. Autofilters? Nay, heathen, we'm don't like that kind of trickery round these parts.
This project is actually a fractal mess of WTF: the whole thing is a giant WTF, and any individual piece you zoom in on is equally full of WTF. I keep meaning to write it up as a thread of its own, but it's too overwhelming.
To give one example, there's a big spreadsheet that's essentially the keystone to the whole job. It's so big that there's no question but that it should be done in a database somehow. Zoom in, and despite that, it's still well within the most basic Excel-syndrome territory, and could be handled reasonably well with some moderately advanced Excel skills - autofiltering, some if functions, cross-referencing so-on, let alone anything using VBA - but we're not allowed to use autofilter (or rather, to save the sheet with it on and send to upper-management). However, zoom in another level, and it turns out that the data is largely inaccurate - and, what's more, is subject to changes (of which we won't be notified) at a rate that almost guarantees that even going by the most optimistic predicted timescales it'll be significantly out of date by the time we come to use it. Zoom in a bit further, and it turns out that the data is in any case not useful for the job at hand, even if it was accurate.
It occurs to me that if I could describe that well, it's almost front-page material on its own, and yet it's only one minor node of the whole thing. The only thing more frustrating than the immense wtf-ery I work with is not being able to do it justice here.
@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:@Nagesh said:I am stuned. Indian railways lying to poor peepul of India. I am going to file for PIL for false advertising claims.Well, they appear to be the biggest railroad employer on the planet.
I'm sorry, is there some explanation as to why this conversation is relevant? Is the thesis here, "if the company has a lot of employees, it must have good software running it? The larger the company, the better the software?" Because I don't think that thesis applies at any large company I've ever worked for.
Nothing like that at all, as far as I can see. The original post said something like 'how different can the Finnish and Indian railway systems be?' and the answer is 'very, very different indeed'. Nagesh quoted a well-known stat about them being the world's second-largest employer (which is apparently wrong in detail, if not in general) and the relevance is that the Indian railway system employs massive numbers of people because the system is basically unchanged in the last century, and isn't computerised in any way. That said, I've heard it described as a giant computer which uses people instead of electrons. The point, though, is correct - in that a system which still uses steam power and no computers really isn't much like a modern hi-tech rail system at all.
I think there was another, separate, point about testing.
@blakeyrat said:
ALSO: MascarponeRun, I loved your poem. CS emailed it out to be before you managed to delete it-- you should post it for realz.Ah, I thought I was a bit late to the joke; someone else had got there first. If you have it in an email, feel free to repost it - I don't think I have a copy. In fact, TRWTF is that CS actually deleted it (from my account's perspective, at least).
@blakeyrat said:
@boomzilla said:@Jaime said:I'd hate to work for some of you people. A typical worker's email storage space costs less than their office chair. It seems like some of you would come to the conclusion "Why should work provide you with a chair? You could work all day standing. Spoiled bastards."
I dunno. My brother in law got a standing desk and he loves it.I've been campaigning to get a treadmill desk. They keep saying, "too expensive for one employee", and I'm like "well, look, we all have laptops, just put one on the floor and enter it into Outlook as a resource so people can 'rent' it" and they don't get it. That was a month ago, I should try again. They just bought me a MSDN sub (so, what, $2500?), no questions asked. And it turns out I didn't even need it. But more email storage and a $1000 desk? NO WAY! This company is just confused.
My dad built himself a treadmill desk out of a freebie/ultra-cheap 'please take it away' treadmill he found in the local paper/craigslist/some-such, an old desk, and some extra bits of wood to raise it a bit. Seems to work.
Would your overlords pay to replace a broken treadmill-desk if you already had one in the office? If so, you don't even need a working treadmill to build one. Or even to build one at all, I guess.
@TheCPUWizard said:
One of my clients just put up a new 5TB rack on their SAN (a little more than 3x what you are willing to have taken out of a months salary). The total price (including 3 years of support) was just shy of $70K [USD].
Now multiple the increase in mailbox quota by the number of users....
What am I missing? 5TB, 5000 users at an extra gig each. Works out to about $4.66 per user per year, doesn't it? In what world is that not cheaper than the time-cost of organising and archiving email?
Recently one of my users was complaining about having to walk around gathering (small amounts of) data using a laptop, angling for an iPad or similar fondleslab. He was quite put-out when his laptop was withdrawn and he was handed a pen and clipboard. As he had quite rightly pointed-out, though, he didn't need the full functionality of a laptop.