this thread was mentioned on the java dev forums, and it one huge wtf that dates back to 2001 and just keeps going...

 

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=150293&start=0&tstart=0 

The craziest thing about this is that its real people.. it has to be, right?

plz email me teh codez  

That type of crap always pisses me off. "Developers" (usually of the outsourced variety) jumping on a thread of someone asking for help and asking for the "codes" to be e-mailed to them. The SMS ones really get them going. I rarely see them ask for help, especially in a new thread (it's always thread-jacking).

Oh.. I also agree with reply #320:

masijade:

Nah, let it go. The spam crawlers are happy!

That's hillarious!  It's like all of the crazy, clueless, ESL-speaking, how-the-hell-did-they-ever-get-a-job-doing-anything developers all just banded together in one single thread! Although I'm sure much of it is just people adding onto it for the hell of it.

I like "filestream's" recent reply on page 22, "OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! STOP THIS MADNESS!"

 

post 322 is awesome too.  "email me and I'll give you teh codes.  I promise I will not sell your email address for 1/100th of a cent."

shadowman:

That's hillarious!  It's like all of the crazy, clueless, ESL-speaking, how-the-hell-did-they-ever-get-a-job-doing-anything developers all just banded together in one single thread! Although I'm sure much of it is just people adding onto it for the hell of it.

I like "filestream's" recent reply on page 22, "OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! STOP THIS MADNESS!"

 

OH GOD THERES MORE THAN ONE PAGE!!!! I read like a few posts, said this aint so bad, so some schmucks are asking some other schmucks to get some code, whatever... BUT it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on... DEAR GOD!

 

I guess that is because is that email send to not wait. ARG regressing English to Brokenenenen English...

petvirus:

this thread was mentioned on the java dev forums, and it one huge wtf that dates back to 2001 and just keeps going...

 

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=150293&start=0&tstart=0 

The craziest thing about this is that its real people.. it has to be, right?

plz email me teh codez  

While you're doing that, perhaps you'd like to sign up for the 2008 warez list?  Now taking early registrations... just post your email address to this thread, along with the words "me too".

 

My guess (desperate hope...) is that there are a few people adding the mass volume of "send codz to me too" messages for fun (most of them, even years old, only have 1 message posted for the account).

On the other hand, it is interesting (in a banging your head into a wall way...)  to look at the profiles for people with more then one post.  A lot of them have 30+ posts that consist of "send codz to me too" and threads where people have tried to answer their question but they just can't grasp the solution (no matter how simply presented).

RocketJeff:

On the other hand, it is interesting (in a banging your head into a wall way...)  to look at the profiles for people with more then one post.  A lot of them have 30+ posts that consist of "send codz to me too" and threads where people have tried to answer their question but they just can't grasp the solution (no matter how simply presented).

Yeah, it's pretty scary. This sort of stuff is actually a very significant part of why I always avoid working with Java or .NET gear. There's just so much awful noise on the community sites.

With the ruby/rails work that I've done, I've always had a better experience. I tend to annoy a local rails group for help, and generally at least one person on the IRC channel will know the answer, and noone expects to be mailed the code.

I'm sickened by the cheapening of the software industry. Hell, there's a little newsstand at my local train station with a billboard up offering software/web development services. Lord knows what their quality control is like. 

drinkingbird:

I'm sickened by the cheapening of the software industry.

I'm with you on that one.

Wow, who are these people and have they heard of that new thing called google?  i like the way on about the second post one poster says to try the JavaPhone API and then in the next post the OP asks for a link to it, just to try it out i put JavaPhone API into google and the first hit is a page where you can download it.  I've always found the people who post on forums like that to be quite strange, i mean do they just post and then sit around waiting for a reply?  I bet in the time it takes to get a post back on the forum you could have just gotten off your arse and actually figured out what you need to do.  I'm waiting for a post something like:

The functional specification of the project i'm working is here.

Plz send me teh code, its urgent!!! 

Plus with that sort of thing i'm guessing they want code that they are going to just paste in without really understanding what it does, i'd love to see some of their finished projects.  I reckon you could probably give them some code with a huge backdoor vulnerability in it and they would just paste it into their code, if you did you could get your backdoor access to a whole bunch of really poorly written outsourced to india projects.  Or just put in something that displays a message box on april fools day metioning that this code has obviously never been checked or audited and has just been pasted directly from an example.

The other thing that strikes me as odd is these people have managed to get a degree or job without even having basic research skills, i mean how do they think other people find the links that they want to send them?

shadowman:

That's hillarious!  It's like all of the crazy, clueless, ESL-speaking, how-the-hell-did-they-ever-get-a-job-doing-anything developers

 

My assumption has always been that the guys who ask those kinds of questions are kids, hobbyists or students.  Maybe I'm being optimistic.

 

 

 

element[0]:

Wow, who are these people and have they heard of that new thing called google?  i like the way on about the second post one poster says to try the JavaPhone API and then in the next post the OP asks for a link to it, just to try it out i put JavaPhone API into google and the first hit is a page where you can download it. 

It's not entirely improbable that they used google to find that thread[1]. It's using it twice in a row for slightly different searches that some people find difficult o_O.

 
That, plus the fact that some people'developing' developers appear to have this theory that using a message board or email list is, somehow, a quicker and more efficient search engine. Based on empirical evidence only I'm afraid.

 

[1] Indeed - it comes up under the 2nd match for "java sms" 

This looks like a queer mix of bots posting bait, hired peons posting bait (and thus behaving gramtically like a bot), and, weepingly enough, real persons genuinely asking for teh cod3, apparently incapable of general text/document comprehension.

I find the last post (on page 22) funny:

i have actually recieved this code from the original poster. if anyone wants this code please send me an email at: amylcusick-[at]-yahoo.com i am now in the process of sending it to the people who asked for it in the last few pages. it works really good actually. ~ amy

They'd better prepare for a whole heap of people emailing them about it :P

Find that stupid?

http://kerneltrap.org/node/5772

It's only six pages, but the quality of stupidity is amazing :>

PonyGumbo:

shadowman:

That's hillarious!  It's like all of the crazy, clueless, ESL-speaking, how-the-hell-did-they-ever-get-a-job-doing-anything developers

 

My assumption has always been that the guys who ask those kinds of questions are kids, hobbyists or students.  Maybe I'm being optimistic.

 

 
Perhaps some of them are, but I've gotten the impression a lot of these people are actually working at a job somewhere.  I see a lot of this kind of stuff on newsgroups and oftentimes the subject is URGENT -- NEED FOR CLIENTS or some other oddness.  It's like the standard in some places is just to BS your way into a job and then worry about figuring out how to do it later. 
 

I like the two posts in a row, the first giving a link to a tutorial, and the second asking if there is a tutorial.  Hooray for reading comprehension (or probably bothering to read at all.)

 

P.S. 

I'm executing a generous project currently involving the effect of laziness on dev forum posting.  plz some kind one should mail me teh WTF?

PJH:

element[0]:

Wow, who are these people and have they heard of that new thing called google?  i like the way on about the second post one poster says to try the JavaPhone API and then in the next post the OP asks for a link to it, just to try it out i put JavaPhone API into google and the first hit is a page where you can download it. 

It's not entirely improbable that they used google to find that thread[1]. It's using it twice in a row for slightly different searches that some people find difficult o_O.

 
That, plus the fact that some people'developing' developers appear to have this theory that using a message board or email list is, somehow, a quicker and more efficient search engine. Based on empirical evidence only I'm afraid.

It's not limited to developers.  I probably should cut the following people some slack because they're just ordinary Google users (not necessarily posing as developers or experts), but some things really boggle the mind.

On the day that gmail added IMAP service, the option was slow to propagate to all users.  Some had the option available right away, and others didn't for a few days.  I had some other unrelated issue, so I went to the gmail help forums.  I'm not exaggerating, almost the entire first 5 pages of each forum was filled with users asking and answering the EXACT SAME QUESTION! With almost the EXACT SAME SUBJECT LINE!  "Why don't I have the option for IMAP?  This isn't working!"  And almost every single one was answered the same way (just wait, it will be available within a day or two...).  Wtf?  Not one of those people could bother to read anyone else's response about the same issue?  It wasn't even like they had to go digging for it.  And it would have been much faster than waiting for a personal response.

 
 

Jetts:

I like the two posts in a row, the first giving a link to a tutorial, and the second asking if there is a tutorial.  Hooray for reading comprehension (or probably bothering to read at all.)

 

P.S. 

I'm executing a generous project currently involving the effect of laziness on dev forum posting.  plz some kind one should mail me teh WTF?

plz mail 2 me 2 thx realname@my-business.com

MrTweek:

Find that stupid?

http://kerneltrap.org/node/5772

It's only six pages, but the quality of stupidity is amazing :>

It's amazing how many people reposted the WRONG answer (like "mkdir \\.\\c:\con", with an extra backslash) and were then CONFIRMED CORRECT by others!

I'm amazed that I'm into the fourth page of the Kerneltrap thread, and nobody has yet given the Most Correct answer to "How do I create a folder named CON in Windows", which is "Don't. You should use a different name that isn't already reserved for a system device."

trwtf is that I believe some of these people might fail a Turing test.

MrTweek:

It's only six pages, but the quality of stupidity is amazing :>

That truely is a WTF. Why anyone would want to do that is unfathomable. Here's a gem:

alt+0160 is an uncutable space.

I wonder why the entity code is NBSP.. hmm.. lemme think.. oh yeah.. Non-Breaking! "Uncutable" sounds like CTRL+X won't work on it (along with the fact the spelling is wrong).

dhromed:

trwtf is that I believe some of these people might fail a Turing test.

Nah.. that would be expected, especially ESLs that are being held under a boot.

But I still can't figure out why anyone would ever need to name a folder using a reserved word like "CON".

shadowman:

On the day that gmail added IMAP service, the option was slow to propagate to all users.  Some had the option available right away, and others didn't for a few days.  I had some other unrelated issue, so I went to the gmail help forums.  I'm not exaggerating, almost the entire first 5 pages of each forum was filled with users asking and answering the EXACT SAME QUESTION! With almost the EXACT SAME SUBJECT LINE!  "Why don't I have the option for IMAP?  This isn't working!"  And almost every single one was answered the same way (just wait, it will be available within a day or two...).  Wtf?  Not one of those people could bother to read anyone else's response about the same issue?  It wasn't even like they had to go digging for it.  And it would have been much faster than waiting for a personal response.

 
 

Am I the only one, or do you also see this recurring (to a certain extent) in the comments to today's frontpage WTF? At least five people posted excerpts from the W3C specs on the first page of comments, often complete with (clickable) link...

(No, I don't want to say this is comparable to the above forums, but.. it's struck me as a funny coincidence.)

Hans Meine:

Am I the only one, or do you also see this recurring (to a certain extent) in the comments

You're not the only one seeing that. And it's not just today's, either. I saw it in other ones, too. I never comment with facts until I read through all comments to make sure they haven't been provided already. Obviously a lot of the posters here don't do that. Might as well just reply with....

FRIST!!!!111!!!1ONE!!

element[0]:

I bet in the time it takes to get a post back on the forum you could have just gotten off your arse and actually figured out what you need to do.

That's the exact fact that discourages me from posting technical questions to forums. If you have nothing else to do, browsing the net is almost always a quicker way to find the solution. Of course,

the worst-case scenario is that you spend hours searching.

Sometimes, if the problem is something like an obscure bug, and you can postpone fixing it for a few days, it might be feasible to post a question and continue working on the project, while waiting for answers.

 

Right now I'm coding an application in [shivers] Actionscript, and I can't even begin to list the innumerable bugs, brain-deadnesses or down-right stupidities I have to face. Without the Flash stage/GUI and Flex' MXML layout, everything I create is pure text, and I feel like I'm pushing the limits of the language. (It's not that hard.)

In order to solve a particular problem, I had to make numerous posts to the Adobe forums, filter hundreds of pages that'd been worded as if they solved coding issues but just ended up introducing this or that feature of one of the GUIs (unavailable in pure Actionscript), or just repeated the official documentation. The official documentation turned out -in addition to being hard to find, vaguely-worded and designer-oriented- to be plainly wrong. I ended up implementing a workaround posted on a blog article that'd been written some time during my search for The Proper Solution. The article itself was based on the official documentation, so it was also incorrect.

 

element[0]:

I'm waiting for a post something like:

The functional specification of the project i'm working is here.

Plz send me teh code, its urgent!!! 

If you're tired of waiting, go to any site that has CS students lurking around. If you also plot the # of C/C++/Java posts on such a site, the local maxima will tell you when homework assignments are due in colleges throughout the world.

 

element[0]:

The other thing that strikes me as odd is these people have managed to get a degree or job without even having basic research skills, i mean how do they think other people find the links that they want to send them?

If you've read my post this far, perhaps you wouldn't mind another short personal rant. Here's an excerpt from a telephone conversation I've had ~12 hours earlier:

My relative: Hi [...] you know this stuff [...] my ipod [...] broken [...] can you come over and fix it?

Me: Don't know how to. Also busy nowadays. Do you have a manual?

M.r.: Yeah, sure.

Me: Well, you could try reading it?

M.r.: Pfft [...] useless [...] I don't understand all this [...] not worth the time [...]

Me: So you want me to come over and read it for you, is that it?

M.r.: Err... You know, never mind, you're busy...

AbbydonKrafts:

But I still can't figure out why anyone would ever need to name a folder using a reserved word like "CON".

Let's say the standard file-storing scheme for my application is to name directories after the first 3 letters of a city, and some data comes from Concordia, Kansas.

This kind of arbitrary restriction is pretty typical of the Windows command prompt in general.  It's an ugly relic of the DOS days.

seaturnip:

This kind of arbitrary restriction is pretty typical of the Windows command prompt in general.  It's an ugly relic of the DOS days.

I still don't get why they had to be global names. What's wrong with having a, say, \DEV directory or some special prefix? (Or why not CON$, PRN$ just like CLOCK$) - I guess it's because of historical reasons.

Well, at least they didn't create file entries inside every directory... (I still don't get why CON\CON would crash, though) 

AbbydonKrafts:

Hans Meine:

Am I the only one, or do you also see this recurring (to a certain extent) in the comments

You're not the only one seeing that. And it's not just today's, either. I saw it in other ones, too. I never comment with facts until I read through all comments to make sure they haven't been provided already. Obviously a lot of the posters here don't do that. Might as well just reply with....

FRIST!!!!111!!!1ONE!!

When you throw something on a scrapheap, you don't rummage through it first on the offchance there might already be one there ;-)

aib:

I still don't get why they had to be global names. What's wrong with having a, say, \DEV directory or some special prefix? (Or why not CON$, PRN$ just like CLOCK$) - I guess it's because of historical reasons.

AIUI, it is for historical reasons.

Back in the days of MSDOS 1.x, you didn't have subdirectories, just a root directory on your 5 1/4 inch floppy (oooh er!)

No. I can't think of any good reason why it hasn't been changed in the 26 years since then. But, if it had, someone would have complained.

BTW - it's not just limited to the command prompt - you can't make a directory called 'NUL', 'CON' or 'COM1' or 'PRN' or 'LPT1' from Explorer either (at least, I can't in Windows XP SP2)

The really daft thing is that originally you had to call them 'CON:' or 'COM1:', with a trailing colon. That was sort of logical. C: is a device, NUL: is a device, COM1: is a device. You can't call a file or folder 'C:' so you couldn't call it 'COM1:' either.
However, for some reason the requirement for a colon got removed for non-disk devices in later versions of DOS, and that got carried over into Windows.

pscs:

aib:

I still don't get why they had to be global names. What's wrong with having a, say, \DEV directory or some special prefix? (Or why not CON$, PRN$ just like CLOCK$) - I guess it's because of historical reasons.

AIUI, it is for historical reasons.

Back in the days of MSDOS 1.x, you didn't have subdirectories, just a root directory on your 5 1/4 inch floppy (oooh er!)

No. I can't think of any good reason why it hasn't been changed in the 26 years since then. But, if it had, someone would have complained.

BTW - it's not just limited to the command prompt - you can't make a directory called 'NUL', 'CON' or 'COM1' or 'PRN' or 'LPT1' from Explorer either (at least, I can't in Windows XP SP2)

The really daft thing is that originally you had to call them 'CON:' or 'COM1:', with a trailing colon. That was sort of logical. C: is a device, NUL: is a device, COM1: is a device. You can't call a file or folder 'C:' so you couldn't call it 'COM1:' either.
However, for some reason the requirement for a colon got removed for non-disk devices in later versions of DOS, and that got carried over into Windows.

I've sometimes wondered how long it's going to be before MS kills all their old cold and starts anew, as Mac did in 99 or so with OSX.  AFAIK, NT wasn't really a "throw away everything."  I mean, how much can you patch up old code before you say "Wouldn't it be easier to start over, knowing what we already know about our past decisions?"  Not a Mac fanboy or anything.  I'm a user of Windows XP, but seriously, I think Vista should be a clue that building on old code isn't always the right way to do things.  

belgariontheking:

I've sometimes wondered how long it's going to be before MS kills all their old cold and starts anew, as Mac did in 99 or so with OSX.  AFAIK, NT wasn't really a "throw away everything."  I mean, how much can you patch up old code before you say "Wouldn't it be easier to start over, knowing what we already know about our past decisions?"  Not a Mac fanboy or anything.  I'm a user of Windows XP, but seriously, I think Vista should be a clue that building on old code isn't always the right way to do things.  

Actually, this CON thing is quite useful. For example, I routinely use copy con test.c to type short code snippets. But PRN is probably somewhat outdated. 8=]

Spectre:

Actually, this CON thing is quite useful. For example, I routinely use copy con test.c to type short code snippets. But PRN is probably somewhat outdated. 8=]

I don't understand.  Is that just a quick way to create an empty file? 

belgariontheking:

I've sometimes wondered how long it's going to be before MS kills all their old cold and starts anew, as Mac did in 99 or so with OSX.  AFAIK, NT wasn't really a "throw away everything."  I mean, how much can you patch up old code before you say "Wouldn't it be easier to start over, knowing what we already know about our past decisions?"  Not a Mac fanboy or anything.  I'm a user of Windows XP, but seriously, I think Vista should be a clue that building on old code isn't always the right way to do things.  

From a technical perspective you're correct, but Microsoft can't do that because it would shatter the illusion that Windows is better than the alternatives because it's familiar. They're clinging to the market by their fingertips, and something like that could easily make them lose everything. 

belgariontheking:

Spectre:

Actually, this CON thing is quite useful. For example, I routinely use copy con test.c to type short code snippets. But PRN is probably somewhat outdated. 8=]

I don't understand.  Is that just a quick way to create an empty file? 

No, it's supposed to be the equivalent of cat >test.c

asuffield:

belgariontheking:

I've sometimes wondered how long it's going to be before MS kills all their old cold and starts anew, as Mac did in 99 or so with OSX.  AFAIK, NT wasn't really a "throw away everything."  I mean, how much can you patch up old code before you say "Wouldn't it be easier to start over, knowing what we already know about our past decisions?"  Not a Mac fanboy or anything.  I'm a user of Windows XP, but seriously, I think Vista should be a clue that building on old code isn't always the right way to do things.  

From a technical perspective you're correct, but Microsoft can't do that because it would shatter the illusion that Windows is better than the alternatives because it's familiar. They're clinging to the market by their fingertips, and something like that could easily make them lose everything. 

Uhh there's nothing illusory here.  There are a large number of existing applications that depend on ancient features of Windows, and a clean upgrade would require rewriting them, wasting serious cash for many organizations.  Why do you think Macs are so rare in the corporate market?  Cost of hardware and lack of admin tools are some of the reasons, but their total disregard for backwards compatibility is arguably just as important.  If a company with an internally developed application goes with Macs, they are locked into a particular generation of technology forever, and screwed when something requires an OS upgrade.

Non-Mac Unix variants are plagued with the same problem of eternal legacy support, incidentally.  Luckily, the core Unix kernel and filesystem architecture is based on industrial-strength, clean design and doesn't desperately need a rewrite.  But it's laughable how the dominant GUI platform is still the X Window System.  At least Microsoft has been able to update that over the years.

seaturnip:

GUI platform

heh, heh, "gooey" (referencing a conversation in another thread).

seaturnip:

Uhh there's nothing illusory here.  There are a large number of existing applications that depend on ancient features of Windows,

 

And pretty damn near every one of them either (a) requires somebody to maintain a win3.1 or win98 box just to run it, or (b) has been repeatedly patched for win95, win98, win2k, winxp, and vista, at absurdly high prices every time. Hence the illusion. Windows isn't actually backwards-compatible, it just does a good job of looking like it is.

asuffield:

seaturnip:

Uhh there's nothing illusory here.  There are a large number of existing applications that depend on ancient features of Windows,

 

And pretty damn near every one of them either (a) requires somebody to maintain a win3.1 or win98 box just to run it, or (b) has been repeatedly patched for win95, win98, win2k, winxp, and vista, at absurdly high prices every time. Hence the illusion. Windows isn't actually backwards-compatible, it just does a good job of looking like it is.

I don't quite understand why they even bother doing backwards compatibility in the way they are implementing it, there are alternatives, either a VM or any API wrapper like WINE. Actually there's so many things that should not have been accessibility on windows sucks (Magnifying program isn't very good according to a very near-sighted classmate), for behaves differently in the shell than it does in a batch file (at least last time I tried to use it in XP), shell's auto completion doesn't work on programs outside the working directory, MSDN is horrible to search through, I don't like puppies or possessed paper clips, window management is non existent, standards (UI mostly) that they publish aren't always used in their own software, they fail to remember settings, and when trouble shooting win 98's internet connectivity it tried to get help from the internet.

Lingerance, I am really stuck, can you plz send me teh source? Thx. Don't sell my email to spammers.

Hey, I stumbled upon a similar thread today...let's hope some script out there is harvesting these kind sir's email addresses....

http://www.flzone.com/showDetail.asp?TypeId=25&NewsId=11427

YUCK!

Code begging... How degrading. And they call themselves developers!? 

death:

YUCK!

Code begging... How degrading. And they call themselves developers!? 

I wish I could do that at my job:  Dear Halliburton, please send me a copy of the oil rigs.  I need this for a drilling project ASAP.  Thanks.

Lingerance:

for behaves differently in the shell than it does in a batch file (at least last time I tried to use it in XP)

That'll be because you are using the .bat extension for your batch files. .bat file are MS-DOS batch files, so they run in the MS-DOS emulator (command.com) in NT-based Windows, which is designed to act like MS-DOS for compatibility.

If you use the .cmd extension for your batch files, they become 'Windows NT Command Script's and run with Windows's shell, cmd.exe. You should also get a nice little speed boost, since no emulation is in effect.

Nobody should be using .bat files unless they need to be compatible with non-NT versions of Windows and DOS. 

It annoys me when applications that only run on NT-based Windows come with a bunch of .bat files (see http://www.e-novative.info/software/ede.php for a particularly bad example).
 

I don't know who wrote the comment that was quoted above "I have actually received this code..."  but I am pretty angry that they would use my email address to post it with.  Please do not use the above email address because it DOES NOT BELONG TO THE ACTUAL POSTER OF THE QUOTE.  I do not know anything about what codes are being referred to.  I have a good idea who might be pretending to be me though---get a life!! 

nothing1:

I don't know who wrote the comment that was quoted above "I have actually received this code..."  but I am pretty angry that they would use my email address to post it with.  Please do not use the above email address because it DOES NOT BELONG TO THE ACTUAL POSTER OF THE QUOTE.  I do not know anything about what codes are being referred to.  I have a good idea who might be pretending to be me though---get a life!! 

 

Okay. First of all, WTF?!