Great Moments in Computer Programming

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

CBS Fantasy sites (like this - https://www.cbssports.com/fantasy/football/ ) will load megabtyes of dumb shit nobody cares about before they put the login screen up. It is absolutely maddening, especially since I'm on a slow connection.

One of the things I've tracked over the years is how many companies are capable of fucking up a login screen. The answer is - many of them! I would think it would be the #1 priority for any company on the web: make sure your customers can login. It's shocking to see how many times they fuck up this extremely simple thing.

(All fantasy sites are garbage, by the way, and someone should come in and disrupt the field.)

[Jizaboz]

When the Sega Saturn was how I connected to the Internet, this kind of thing infuriated me. Some sites would just take forever to load or fail to load because it wanted to load ads and bullshit first. Back then I just moved on to another site. Now people just accept this kind of horseshit and have for years with faster connections.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

When the Sega Saturn was how I connected to the Internet, this kind of thing infuriated me. Some sites would just take forever to load or fail to load because it wanted to load ads and bullshit first. Back then I just moved on to another site. Now people just accept this kind of horseshit and have for years with faster connections.

Waitasec. Back the F up.

The Sega SATURN was how you connected to the Internet?

[Jizaboz]

Waitasec. Back the F up.

The Sega SATURN was how you connected to the Internet?

I certainly did! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Net_Link

It was way cheaper than having a good computer with AOL or whatever, but of course had limitations. A big one was it could run Javascript but not actual Java.

[Tdarcos]

A big one was it could run Javascript but not actual Java.

An even bigger fuckup was the person(s) who named the run-time scripting language JavaScript when the two languages have nothing to do with each other. The standardized version has the name "ECMAScript" as ECMA is the standards body who released the standard. And that might have been worse. If you mention ECMAScript to people they'd probably think it's a skin disease or a type of dandruff.

"Head and Shoulders... For the heartbreak of ECMAScript, err, we mean psoriasis."

[RealNC]

Yeah. Or the idiot who named their web content creation system "Hugo".

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Yeah. Or the idiot who named their web content creation system "Hugo".

That one really bugs the shit out of me.

[Tdarcos]

Yeah. Or the idiot who named their web content creation system "Hugo".

That one really bugs the shit out of me.

Unfortunately, this is why if you develop any kind of successful product you're supposed to register the name with the US Patent and Trademark Office in order to have exclusivity on that name, even if the item is given away for free. This is why major open source projects like Apache, PHPBB, Audacity and others have done so.

Or, if it isn't worth spending $250 on a federal registration, one can register at the state level. In Colorado you can register a trademark on-line through the Secretary of State's website for $25 and if you get larger, the state registration can be used as evidence of usage. I've used it myself. What did I register? The phrase "In the Matter of" for a series of books.That's why, techically, the titles of my two books are "In the Matter of: Instrument of God" and "In the Matter of: The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts."

You can't really blame the developers of the web product Hugo, I suspect either a Thompson & Thompson state trademark search and a Patent & Trademark Office search would return no hits for a software product with that name.

[Flack]

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22in+the+ma ... _sb_noss_2

[Jizaboz]

Oh shit

[AArdvark]

Is there nothing we can believe in anymore?

[Flack]

Want to give a special shout out to the Acer engineer who thought the bottom panel of an Acer Swift 3 laptop should be held together with 11 different Torx screws, each one a different length so they have to go back in the exact same hole. Super cool choice, bro.

[Casual Observer]

This belongs here because I guess new Subaru's are basically a LAN with dozens of computer systems. Apparently, whenever a Subaru Outback's battery dies, the drivers front passenger window button stops working. The dealer gave me what seems like a cheat code to fix it: using the passenger door's window button, roll it down and hold the button for 2 seconds then roll back up and hold the button up for 2 seconds. Voila, fixed. You would think that there would be some kind of computer update for that kind of thing.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Smoke alarm went off at 1:30AM last night. Glad they all make the same chirp, glad there's no clock in them to maybe chirp during daylight hours, loved going to the garage to get a ladder. A triumph.

I woke up to find our golden retriever Honey, who is sometimes ahhhhhh a little slow, had gone downstairs by herself and buried her ears in the couch pillows. She is the only person who understands me.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'm on mobile, so I won't quote, but Commander - I get why anyone can call their new language whatever they want. But whoever made the other Hugo probably did a search and saw the text game language and decided to act like a pig. Legality has nothing to do with it, sir.

[Ice Cream Jonsey not logged in]

We have to use Outlook at work. It's terrible, of course, but here is a specific.

There is an Outlook setting for what you want to do when replying to a group - reply regularly or reply all.

The. Default. Choice. Is. Reply. All.

I used to wonder how so many people could be so stupid that they would start Reply All chains and this makes a lot more sense - people aren't stupid, fuck-ups writing code for Microsoft are.

[Casual Observer]

Reply-all shouldn't just NOT be the default choice, I think there should be a doublecheck like when you try to open an unsecure link, something like "Are you sure you want to reply to all of these email addresses?"

[Tdarcos]

I used to be on the list of bidders to provide goods and services to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. One time a request for bids was e-mailed out to me, and I tried to open it, and nothing happened. No message, no nothing. Finally, I think it was 5 minutes later, the message opened.

It was an announcement that the transity authority wanted bids for something, computers, cement, I don't remember. What I do remember was the reason why the message wouldn't open.

In the To: field of the message was a lisat of e-mail addresses the message had been sent to by the transi authority (instead of putting them in BCC:)

The To: field contained all 1,603 e-mail addresses it was sent to. Me and 1,602 others.

[Flack]

And while I've made a living supporting Microsoft operating systems over the past 25 years, a big kudos to the team that decided new installations of Windows 10 Home would not only require an Outlook.com email address, but also a phone number so it can text you a security code while you're installing it. Nothing could be more convenient when setting up a laptop for a friend's kid than knowing that someday in the middle of night they're going to trigger something that's linked to my cell phone number which is now embedded in this laptop.

[AArdvark]

Seriously, they did that?