Tales of IT Idiocy 181
snydeq writes "IT fight club, dirty dev data, meatball sandwiches — InfoWorld offers nine more tales of brain fail beyond belief. 'You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life. Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights — and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.'"
Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not really IT related, but in a similar vein to some of these stories, the worst workplace war I've ever seen erupted over a parking space. Here were two college-educated adults, both of whom made over $100,000 a year--at war with each other because one maintained that he had been assigned said space (even though it wasn't marked) and the other kept parking there. Combine that with weak leadership at the company, and bam!, you had an escalation that got fucking crazy. First it was potshots and pranks, then they started keying each others' cars. Then they were openly screaming at each other in the office. It only ended when the cops had to get involved (they were calling each other with death threats and one of them showed up to the other's house with a gun). They both ended up with restraining orders...and also pink slips (when management finally woke up and realized they were both nuts).
When you're in the city, people take their parking spaces VERY seriously. And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.
But, hey, if the assassination of one dipshit Archduke could start a World War and one little fruit vendor setting himself on fire could start the Arab Spring, I guess any little thing can spark a fire.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess any little thing can spark a fire.
Only when you have enough fuel. Which in this case is probably a metaphor for workplace resentment.
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Bullshit's flammable????
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Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Funny)
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It would have been a funny ending if the whole thing had been encouraged by a 3rd party.
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It probably was, on stuff like that, the whole workplace becomes a rumor mill and people take sides.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Funny)
And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.
Wait, what? I don't think it's gotten any longer.
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Any little thing is the spark. You need kindling like discontent in the general population for a fire. Or, when the atmosphere itself becomes toxic, you get an explosion.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Insightful)
It'd be the equivalent of someone assassinating the vice-president of the US today -- not just some random bozo getting killed.
If headlines read "Joe Biden" assassinated! about 90% of the US population would have shrugged their shoulders and said 'who'?
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That's because Americans don't have a reason to care of a POTUS or Veep croaks.
For better or worse (I argue "better") most of us are smart enough not to care about whatever hack is currently infesting the Oval Office.
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And the other 10 percent popped open a beer.
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I'd also point out calling the man who had been striving for peaceful relations (against the will of much of the military) with Serbia, and who envisioned converting the Austro-Hungarian empire into a federal state with more rights for minorities (thus potentially reducing the risk of ethnic strife in the Balkans) a 'dipshit' is a bit disrespectful. I mean sure the man was very far from perfect (staunchy conservative in the European old Catholic style and exactly as aristocratic as you might expect from som
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IT idiocy? (Score:5, Interesting)
IT idiocy? Is there a more idiotic tech site than IT World itself, with its twenty ad-laden pages for ten paragraphs, after a goddamned splash screen? I refuse to visit those morons. No RTFA this time, folks. Link to a respectable site next time.
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Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
My pet theory is of the "norm problem":
Every person has a problem of which he thinks it is the most important one. He will scale all other problems according to his norm problem. He will devote the same energy on his norm problem as other people do for theirs.
The norm problem of a) may be that his family is starving and of b) that his neighbor occupies his parking space. Nevertheless they will approach their norm problem with max energy.
If you have two people competing for the same goal as norm problem, you will get a major turf war, no matter how trivial the object is.
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So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Funny)
So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?
Apparently so. The existence of engineers who make that much and more by technical wits alone seems to be a myth in the poster's mind.
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Uhhh... it really depends on the market you're in. If there are only a handful of people in your city that can, say, code in C and C++ with a fwew years experience under their belts, then you may have to pay that to keep people.
That's not an unreasonable salary for an experienced dev, DBA or unix guy where I live.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
You fail at reading comprehension.
You fail at logic.
The context is people who earn on the order of $100k/year, not, say, in the millions. It is discussing "upper-middle-range talent", not one in a million technical or marketing geniuses. The people who earn around $100k/year are the bane of society: they are sufficiently numerous and have sufficient purchasing power to make their opinion known, but sufficiently stupid that they don't realise it's only chance which selected them from a thousand others and that it's only a dysfunctional job marketplace which pays so many people that sort of amount.
I'm not quite sure why there's always a knee-jerk response to criticism of someone gaining something of "UR JUST ENVIOUS". Is it clear that I condemn serial rapists who remain at large because I just don't get enough sex? No, of course not. Is it clear that I condemn the US military because my country's military doesn't have its might? I bet I'd hear more people arguing that. You know when the argument comes up? Precisely when the arguer is so self-centred as to be unable to perceive a moral question. Almost everyone agrees that serial rape is wrong so no-one talks about being envious of the rapist. But when a form of power imbalance is perceived as just by someone, then surely the problem must be that everyone who raises an objection is just envious - after all, that's the position of the former. Those who object to power are just envious of those with power. Yeah, that's it. Slaves just envy the slavedrivers.
Idiot.
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I could probably make the same argument for a salary of around $55k for a guy doing any kind of IT when there are 50 million college educated IT professionals in India who are quite literally starving on the streets. Even if they only do half as good a job, they are willing to work for a tenth of the first world guy, and a company will spring up over there that will exploit that person and turn around and sell his services for a quarter of what it costs to keep the American employed. Even at 50% efficienc
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
No one works an Indian IT job where they are "literally starving in the streets", because they'll DIE. They'll do something else that has a better return: NOT DYING. I have an IT job and I don't worry about "exploiting" the third world because my job has nothing to do with what happens in the third world. I am not stealing bread out of the mouth of some Indian guy because I am able to buy sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for my household. Once people realize that life is not a zero-sum game, and that charity means selfless giving, we're just going to suffer from greed and class warfare.
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No one works an Indian IT job where they are "literally starving in the streets", because they'll DIE.
You misunderstood me so I will try again. I am saying that there are millions of educated Indians who do not have work right now. Do you think they made a rational choice to become educated and just fucking DECIDE to be a slumdog? You know very little about India don't you?
I have an IT job and I don't worry about "exploiting" the third world because my job has nothing to do with what happens in the third world.
That may be true, but I bet you their jobs, expertise and ability to provide cheap IT services may have something to do with what happens in the first world. If your companies competitor figures out how to offshore and cuts their cost
Anyone have a Greasemonkey script (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone have a Greasemonkey script on-hand that automatically hides stories containing links to infoworld.com, or do I have to whip one up on my own?
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Well, better convert them to links to printable pages...
Way more than 9 elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
The Daily WTF [slashdot.org] has a lot of fantastic stories about what not to do. The stories include horrific interviews, code that makes you want to squirm at best, and plenty of IT mistakes.
Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere (Score:5, Informative)
This [thedailywtf.com] is the link he meant to post.
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The WTF part is where the article says "IT idiocy" but then proceeds to be just another "users are so dumb" story. Thedailywtf.com is much more about IT "professionals" themselves being idiots which is much more funny.
Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere (Score:4, Informative)
http://faildesk.net/ [faildesk.net] is pretty good too.
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While it's certainly amusing, it's also something that I think is a valuable resource for all developers to read. Seeing WTF-worthy code (or design decisions) helps you recognize it when you encounter it in the wild (design reviews, code reviews, HR policies,etc), and call bullshit when necessary. Many of the WTFs are about SQL, which is far outside my area of expertise or responsibility, but I feel like the code-related ones have helped me be a better programmer by being a constant reminder to read things
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I feel like the code-related ones have helped me be a better programmer by being a constant reminder to read things carefully, sanitize inputs, and ensure that it makes sense to someone not up to their ears in this section of code.
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com] sanitize inputs classic...
From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open... (Score:3)
Where is the document? What program is the document for? Filename? Purpose? Anything? Nothing.... as well as obviously not knowing what 'formatting' means, as neither the computer-sense nor the page-laying-sense fit there.
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That's a beautiful example of how nomenclature in IT can confuse a civilian. I don't blame the employee at all for coming to that conclusion. I just bought a printer that prints in "duplex" mode. Now, that's something so common that it should not be using a software engineer's term. Can you imagine a parent or grandparent trying to get double-sided copies and only seeing "duplex"?
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If we're doing user quotes: "I need you to transfer the license."
We asked for more info, and got: "My son-in-law plugged his computer into my computer and said you needed to transfer the license."
Guessing at what she meant, we told her that she couldn't just install software assigned to her on computers owned by family members. Then she got annoyed with us and said: "The computer won't turn on! My son-in-law used his laptop to figure out you need to transfer the license!"
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I routinely get emails that say things like "i get a box that says cannot connect".
I mean sure, I understand people can't be troubled to write down the contents of every error message they see, but would a little basic grammar hurt?
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Save your clicks! (Score:5, Informative)
They'll have more tales of idiocy, and you won't feel like you need to take a shower afterwards. Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.
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And to add to the Monday doldrum... a blast from the past
The bastard operator from hell [anarres.org] :)
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Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.
Nah; "WTF" generally refers to things that make no sense. In this case, what InfoWorld and zillions of other sites are doing makes perfect sense. You just need to understand that they want money, and their main way of getting it is by running ads past their viewers. This gives them a strong incentive to break articles up into small chunks, so you have to click from one to the next to read an article. That way, they can show that you clicked on N copies of an ad, rather than just one, and get N times th
Tales of Dumb IT (Score:5, Funny)
Reading InfoWorld is about number 6 or so.
What about clueless admins? (Score:5, Interesting)
In my time I have seen some amazing examples of idiocy.
I once had to lecture some linux admins as to the nature of ntpd and how they don't have to be constantly logging in to set the time, but here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time. So all they had to do was log in to the system and the time would be automatically set. I only got involved when they were trying to develop an automated login system so they wouldn't have to log in to 500+ linux servers, constantly, all to keep the time set. I actually had to argue with them, to show they what ntpd could do. It was unreal.
Then there was the time I found windows admins that thought you had to have a user account for every machine you joined to a domain. A unique user account. A unique administrative user account. And because they had several thousand machines, password maint was a nightmare...or at least would be, except they came to the conclusion that using an easy to remember password on all of these administrator accounts was an easier solution.
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here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time. So all they had to do was log in to the system and the time would be automatically set.
Now what would be funnier, that login name having to be "root" or having ntpdate SUID root...
Re:What about clueless admins? (Score:4, Funny)
Given the obvious competence level of these admins, do you think they knew how to make ntpdate work as a non-root user?
Ya, neither do I. And yes, they were logging in as root....with a shared public/private key set. Note: BOTH private AND public keys were shared amongst all 500 servers.
Because ssh keys are more secure, don't you know.
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And none could figure out the "hard" ssh command line option to run a command ...? (ssh can run rsh-like).
Then again, I'd shudder to think what the shell script owuld look like
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but here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time.
Holy crap. I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.
Re:What about clueless admins? (Score:5, Funny)
I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.
Whoa, I just looked up cron.. My god you just saved my job man! I couldn't get my sleep script to run in the background right... Jesus I've spent 4 weeks on this job and now I can move on to the next. Getting every system to default saving files to root:root from smb shares!
Thanks for saving me...
140 million dollar contract (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortune 25 contractor promises another Fortune 25 client that they can migrate their entire operation without a single desktop engineer. This was a 140 million dollar contract. Client also promised that their network conversion from 10Mb hubs to 100Mb switches would be finished before we started and then postponed the network conversion.
When everything was said and done lawyers for both companies mutually decided that I was the best the person on the ground with the best insight into why things fell apart. I was told by lawyers on both sides I would be subpoenaed as the primary witness and that the trial was expected to take about four months. I wasn't being blamed by either side, I was just the one who knew what the hell was going on.
When you testify as a witness (vs expert witness) you are limited to a $50 court fee and can't be otherwise reimbursed. I would have been financially ruined for other peoples idiocy and figured out a perfectly honest way to get out of situation their idiocy created.
I told lawyers for both sides that I would appear and testify, and they would neither one like what I had to say. They settled two days later.
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The opposite in this case, both of their cases were strong. I got dragged into the contract stuff later on to make sure that I knew what both sides were looking for.
The vendor offered in plain language that they could do the migration without needing a single field engineer. This of course was something a salesman came up with that had no basis in anything remotely realistic.
The client offered in plain language that their network migration would be completed before the vendor's contract started. The client
Reminds me of one of our clients. (Score:5, Funny)
They were running an older CRM version that still used direct file access.
Because of this, their backup solution (for which they hadn't bought the live file backup module) would fail every night due to someone in the office leaving the program open.
So they "fixed" it.
6 months down the road they had a server crash and lost everything.
So we're like "Okay, let's roll to backups. There's still data loss, but minimal, a day or so."
Uh. What backups?
Their "fix" had consisted of simply deleting that CRM program's directory from the backups (see: NOT BACKING IT UP) so their backup reports were all nice and pretty.
The latest real backup this company had was over 6 months old.
The company that was in place to handle their IT was out on the curb with smoking ears and a boot-print on the ass shortly afterward.
Shark Tank. (Score:5, Informative)
>only 10 submissions of fail in the TFA.
Someone already mentioned the Daily WTF, so I'll post its little brother.
Always an interesting read.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/sharky [computerworld.com]
--
BMO
Make it idiot-proof... (Score:3, Funny)
"I can't log in when I type in my password! It's broken!" - The problem? They weren't typing in their username, they were only typing in their password.
My all time favorite was a customer who was very unhappy with an application we had created for them to send out event invitations and what not. I get an angry e-mail passed to me. The claim: "Whenever I type in someone's e-mail address, instead of e-mailing that person, the system figures out who their spouses and children are, and sends them the notification instead!" I had to repeatedly confirm that what they're describing is not possible. Even then, the person still angrily refused to believe me. If I were to create software that somehow psychically figure out all of that information, I'd be very rich, and probably be working for the government.
Re:Make it idiot-proof... (Score:5, Insightful)
it kind of is possible, many people have email accounts that direct to several mailboxes, like @familyname.com. If your app was sending to an unknown name at the front of that (instead of 'dave@family' it was 'whoever@family') then its possible it got delivered to all accounts using that shared mailbox system.
Not that I'm saying this is what happened, but something along those lines due to some wacky configuration.
Moral: never disbelieve the user, although what they say is impossible, when you look at it, you find that not only is it possible, it's also happening. If only we could get the users to describe it in terms a tech would understand.
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Generally my talking-to-the-end user script goes like this:
- What program were you using?
- What were you (clicking on, typing, whatever)?
- What did you expect to happen?
- What happened instead?
If they're getting an error message, I'll get them to send me a screenshot or cut-and-paste it. I've had way too many times when someo
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Re:Make it idiot-proof... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Never disbelieve the user" is right. One of my early tech support calls (many moons ago) was from a guy who claimed his computer rebooted every time he flushed his toilet.
Yeah. I figured he was yanking my chain, but you can't just hang up on people, so after humoring him for a few minutes we actually set up a tech visit.
We fixed him up, at least temporarily, by installing a UPS for his system.
He lived way out in the boonies and used well water and a septic tank. Turns out when he flushed, not only did his computer reboot, but his lights flickered for a moment, too. Flushing the toilet activated some power-hungry pump in his water system, and the draw was browning out his computer.
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I once worked at a place where the Windows group policy was to enter the username on all logins (it was really to wipe the previous username). So unlike most other Windows shops, you had to type both to log in. The system was set up so that we get messages about repeated erroneous logins, including the computer name, username, and time. We use to get notices all the time that someone was logging into a particular computer with usernames like S33Y0uL@t3r and !L0veY0u.
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One thing I noticed right away on the iPad is that, when entering a password, it momentarily shows the letter typed before replacing it with a bullet mark. I've caught errors more than a few times that way. Actually, didn't Jakob Nielsen or some usability expert come out against password masking?
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Needless to say, I sent that one back and asked for a different file format.
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Infoworld (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not trying to cry foul or call anyone out. I'm just curious about what drives some of the patterns that emerge on slashdot. If someone from either Infoworld or slashdot could weigh in that would be great.
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Pretty bad. I didn't think it was anything new, and the writing style was a sloppier version of the Darwin awards, as I remember them from when I gave up on them six or eight years ago. (Some of the stories were less than properly verified.)
Retrieving unsaved data (Score:2)
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I have a bunch of those from that era - here's a couple:
User is used to Word Perfect, but has to use WordStar. User wants to print, so presses Control-P. Wordstar erases (p = purge in WordStar, print in Word Perfect) the document and the user hadn't saved it first. There was no confirmation dialog back then, either. An hour of typing a news article gone in a second.
User on a mac using Microsoft Word chooses Revert, but didn't know Revert means go back to the last saved version of the document and loses 2 ho
Re:Retrieving unsaved data (Score:4, Interesting)
Only distantly related, but ... A long time ago I was writing code on a Perq workstation. The editor had a nice feature - it maintained a transcript of every change, and you could replay it. This became very useful once when I was working madly under deadline, and failed to save the file for ... wait for it ... 36 hours (yes, it was an all-nighter and then some). And the machine crashed - actually I think the power got cut. But with the transcript feature I was able to replay the entire 36 hour editing session, watching myself do my editing. It was rather fun, actually. Of course it was much faster than the original - I think it took an hour or so. And I was redeemed from my stupidity.
I loved the transcript feature - it was useful any time the machine or the program crashed, as it could restore everything up to the last disk write that succeeded. You could also pause and continue, so if you went off on a dead-end, you could replay up to the point where you started going the wrong way and stop, step backwards or forwards to the point where you had something worth keeping, and then save or start editing at that point.
I think it would be great for any text editor to do this.
Re:Retrieving unsaved data (Score:5, Insightful)
One day a woman came in, worked on a paper for a couple of hours, and then had her computer crash. She went to the lab assistant on duty, who didn't try to be helpful or sympathetic at all -- he just blew her off with a "well, you should have saved".
She blew up at him. Yelled, screamed, made a gigantic fuss. Lab guy thought it was funny, still wasn't trying to calm her down or be helpful at all. The supervisor heard the noise (his office was across the hall from the lab) and came in to see what was wrong. He talked to the woman, got her to go across the hall where she wouldn't be disturbing everyone else who was still trying to use the lab. There, he offered sympathy, offered to help her with retyping.
Once she started to calm down, she started crying. He finally found out that she'd been raped a couple of weeks before. She'd lost a lot of time for getting ready for finals and doing final papers in doing interviews with the police and the prosecuting attorneys -- and then found out earlier that day that the DA's office had decided not to prosecute her attacker, because he was a former boyfriend of hers and they were afraid they wouldn't be able to persuade the jury that it wasn't just her changing her mind after the fact.
He pointed her to the campus rape center so she could get help -- not just with the legal case and the emotional fallout, but also to have them talk to her professors. She didn't need to be trying to handle finals like that.
The moral is: You don't know how bad a day someone else has had. When people get extremely upset over something that seems like it shouldn't be that upsetting, there's a good chance that they were already upset about something else. And, of course, he added that if we had someone in the lab we just couldn't handle, get him or call the campus police if it was after his office hours. We should try to be nice, but remember that our job was lab attendant, not social worker.
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Holy fucking shit! I have had issues but nothing like that!
Just today, one of our remote sites was having an issue with an external drive that was causing an issue with a database. Such things are routine and our OPS staff normally handles them without issues. However the problem reappeared and the person who worked on it had already left. The new guy working on it sent a polite but utterly clueless email about it. The client of course exploded. I stepped in and said I would handle it. I have been he
the first rule of I.T. fight club is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, QA for the game industry, but close enough. (Score:2)
Tales from the trenches [trenchescomic.com] has some horror stories as well.
The Trenches [trenchescomic.com] comic is off to a slow start, I can't decide if I like it or not, but the QA tales below it are worth a read, IMO. I especially like this one [trenchescomic.com], because it's so true; In many projects where "ship it" becomes as much a battle cry as a new form of profanity, and not just in Game development...
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I've been following it since launch day. The comic is cute, but I see it as a fun little distraction/bonus on top of the stories. The stories are definitely the best part.
PS: Law Star rules.
/. Got the Title Right, Original Article, Not (Score:2)
"I am in pain" - A developer's life (Score:2)
A developer's life (1:44 minutes, SFW) [youtube.com]
Haunting really :-)
Huh? (Score:3)
Okay, serious question. Is it really a bad idea to make people's email addresses public? the article makes it seem like this is a bad practice. To me, if you are counting on email addresses to be private, that you have some crappy security going on.
""We took the roster of employees of our two largest offices and checked their corporate email addresses to see which were accessible off the Web. Out of 178 employees, 138 corporate email addresses were easily discovered -- like two or three clicks off Google. That alone surprised me."
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Only in that it makes you a target, and if your spam/phishing/malware filter doesn't detect it, you're relying on users to fall for them -- and they demonstrated with their test that a large number of the users were gullible.
Email issue (Score:2)
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Sad But True (Score:2)
I work in IT. I once received a help request from a person in a computer lab who told me that their screen would only display blackness, regardless of moving their mouse or tapping the keyboard. The monitor was on. So, I came to take a look, and sure enough, the screen was black.
Know why?
Because the fucking computer wasn't even there. It had been removed for service and the "Out of order" sign taped to the monitor somehow wasn't enough of an indicator.
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Short Circuit (Score:2)
Retail store decided to move the main front counter of the store. It wasn't permanently fixed to the flooring, but was hard-wired in with electrical and serial connections (serial terminals and printers). The decided it would be okay to just put eight people to work and lift the whole thing at once to drag it over about a foot. With the serial terminals and printers on it. Plugged in. Turned on.
After a couple inches they got a nice *POP POP POP* and puff of smoke off each piece of gear. Not just on the coun
"I've found the solution to no space: delete data" (Score:2)
A while ago, I worked at a small print shop that was bought out and went from being run by a print guy to being run by ex-corp IT people. They spent their retirement money on this place thinking it would be relaxing. Then then found out how non-tech it was and off we went to turn a low-tech print shop into a high-tech outfit.
They had vision of being something like Vistaprint is now, except this was in 1999-2000 when that sort of thing hadn't been invented yet.
In any case, they started this project to scan
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The png format existed by then. Was there any reason that tiff files were used instead.
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I think a NAT lease is when your home router boots up.
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I think a NAT lease is when your home router boots up.
Are you kidding? That router is mine. I paid for it. Mine.
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Yeah I think my joke wasn't obvious enough...
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What a howler!
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It depends on the language. In C, = is the assignment operator and == is the equal to operator. if (a==b) will perform the next statement if a and b are equal to each other. If (a=b) will assign the value of b to a and then always perform the next statement. This can sometimes lead to obscure logic errors that are a pain to hunt down until you notice it and slap your hand over your face and groan. Anyone who has been programming in C for any length of time gets this drilled down to the level of the subconsc
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Oops. Got confused about which example demonlapin meant. The reason that example was bad is because an if() conditionally executes the next statement or code block, which means something ending with ; or surrounded by {}. So, if you have a ; right after an if(), that means that it conditionally executes everything between the if() and the ;, which is nothing but whitespace, and then it proceeds to the code block surrounded by {}. which is now no longer executed conditionally.
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Did they punch the hole in the corner or the middle of one of the edges?