Comment On ¿Qué?

LOL.
Nothing more.

There's a typo in the text:

In addition to attaining a whole new level of smudgyness, Rogier found himself much more popular after getting a new iPhone.

Fixed.

CAPTCHA: illum. Inati?

Pyro:

Well those who can't understand English will probably push any button randomly, so the interface is at least 75% working :)

That means that it will provide us with half a bit of information. Not bad...

"I ran into this one while trying to run the HP CDROM check for my laptop," wrote Nick M. "Fortunately, closing the door to my office seemed to solve the problem."

Maybe it was feeling cold :)

Now the JesusPhone can also do the miracle of multiplying email messages on the inbox? LOL

And the CDROM message "could you close the door" is priceless, also.

TheDailyWTFGhostReader:

And the CDROM message "could you close the door" is priceless, also.

I think it was HAL's cd-rom drive..
Or was it GLaDOS'? ;)

StarLite:

TheDailyWTFGhostReader:

And the CDROM message "could you close the door" is priceless, also.

I think it was HAL's cd-rom drive..
Or was it GLaDOS'? ;)

GLaDOS would offer cake for closing the door.

TheDailyWTFGhostReader:

Now the JesusPhone can also do the miracle of multiplying email messages on the inbox? LOL

And the CDROM message "could you close the door" is priceless, also.

"where are you... could you come over here"

Peter Gordon:

The top picture is not a WTF. They printed it in a really big font, and as all british tourists know, shouted english is just as good as speaking a foreign language, and the natives always understand perfectly. The only way to improve it would have been something like:

CAN-O YOU
READ-O AND
UNDERSTAND-O
THE ENGLISH-O?

Maybe with some animated hand-waving somehow.

No Translation available

Peter Gordon:

The top picture is not a WTF. They printed it in a really big font, and as all british tourists know, shouted english is just as good as speaking a foreign language, and the natives always understand perfectly. The only way to improve it would have been something like:

CAN-O YOU
READ-O AND
UNDERSTAND-O
THE ENGLISH-O?

Maybe with some animated hand-waving somehow.

Shouting english at people only works if they are blind...

Coincoin:

TheDailyWTFGhostReader:

Now the JesusPhone can also do the miracle of multiplying email messages on the inbox? LOL

And the CDROM message "could you close the door" is priceless, also.

"where are you... could you come over here"

Assume the party escort submission position, or you will miss the party.

The first one is understandable. "NO" is very similar in most Indo-European languages (no, non, nyet) so most people will recognize the "no" button, and quite probably the word "English".

This makes it relatively simple for the people who don't speak English to select the right answer.

CD-ROM Diagnostic understands and acknowledges your CD drive's need for privacy before putting the elbow-length gloves on.

Zemyla:

The first one is understandable. "NO" is very similar in most Indo-European languages (no, non, nyet) so most people will recognize the "no" button, and quite probably the word "English".

This makes it relatively simple for the people who don't speak English to select the right answer.

Вы говорите русского? Да. Нет.
Μιλάτε τα ελληνικά; Αριθ. ναι.

You're assuming that they use the same alphabet as English. The above are Russian and Greek respectively (thanks babelfish!) The correct "No" answers are Нет and Αριθ.

Those who can't understand English will probably push No, as it's the only word there that's in Spanish.

Pyro:

Well those who can't understand English will probably push any button randomly, so the interface is at least 75% working :)

You obviously have no experience with end lusers. Those who speak English will always push any button randomly.

Ever wondered why it takes the person in front of you so long to get money out of the ATM when it takes people like us a few seconds? It takes them awhile to brute force all the button combinations until they get what they want, green stuff they can buy beer with.

Binks:

Those who can't understand English will probably push No, as it's the only word there that's in Spanish.

Which is great, as Spain is of course where all British people go on holiday, carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh because they "overdid it on the first day. And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Cameron should be running this country and how many languages Boris Johnson can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X', food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...

Вы говорите русского? Да. Нет.
Μιλάτε τα ελληνικά; Αριθ. ναι.

You're assuming that they use the same alphabet as English. The above are Russian and Greek respectively (thanks babelfish!) The correct "No" answers are Нет and Αριθ.

Don't be so fast to thank babelfish. No is "Όχι" in greek, babelfish probably understood "No" as "number".

"OI! PEDRO! DO YOU SERVE CHIPS?"

The good news here is that the airplanes themselves don't run Internet Explorer. Well, I mean, probably they don't. Right?

Actually the cabin entertainment systems made by Rockwell Collins are just full screened internet explorer sessions.

Pyro:

Well those who can't understand English will probably push any button randomly, so the interface is at least 75% working :)

One of two buttons... that's 75%. Yeah, those statistics sound right.

java.lang.Chris;:

Binks:

Those who can't understand English will probably push No, as it's the only word there that's in Spanish.

Which is great, as Spain is of course where all British people go on holiday, carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh because they "overdid it on the first day. And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Cameron should be running this country and how many languages Boris Johnson can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X', food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...

Monthy Python quote train, anybody? :)

jon787:

The good news here is that the airplanes themselves don't run Internet Explorer. Well, I mean, probably they don't. Right?

Actually the cabin entertainment systems made by Rockwell Collins are just full screened internet explorer sessions.

The entertainment system on my recent KLM flight runs Linux. I know because it crashed and rebooted automatically. The one for the passenger next to me hung and had to be reset by the cabin crew.

Which just proves that you can write crappy software for any OS.

"The good news here is that the airplanes themselves don't run Internet Explorer."

However the Boeing 787's entertainment system does run on Windows. You won't drop out of the sky, but don't get too wrapped up in that showing of Shrek 3 either.

Anonymous:

StarLite:

TheDailyWTFGhostReader:

And the CDROM message "could you close the door" is priceless, also.

I think it was HAL's cd-rom drive..
Or was it GLaDOS'? ;)

GLaDOS would offer cake for closing the door.

And grief counseling. Thankfully, most of us here work in the tech sector and have had enough experience with end users that we're already enrolled in grief counseling.

mondokat:

Pyro:

Well those who can't understand English will probably push any button randomly, so the interface is at least 75% working :)

One of two buttons... that's 75%. Yeah, those statistics sound right.

Assuming 50% English and 50% non-English, that's pretty much right.

50% English * 100% Correct = 50% Correct
50% Non-English * 50% Correct = 25% Correct

50% + 25% = 75% Correct overall.

Sven:

jon787:

The good news here is that the airplanes themselves don't run Internet Explorer. Well, I mean, probably they don't. Right?

Actually the cabin entertainment systems made by Rockwell Collins are just full screened internet explorer sessions.

The entertainment system on my recent KLM flight runs Linux. I know because it crashed and rebooted automatically. The one for the passenger next to me hung and had to be reset by the cabin crew.

Which just proves that you can write crappy software for any OS.

Was that ever in doubt?

If you count the four on the screen, Rogier got exactly 2^31 email messages. That's a hacker who's in waaaaaaay too deep.

jpers36:

mondokat:

Pyro:

Well those who can't understand English will probably push any button randomly, so the interface is at least 75% working :)

One of two buttons... that's 75%. Yeah, those statistics sound right.

Assuming 50% English and 50% non-English, that's pretty much right.

50% English * 100% Correct = 50% Correct
50% Non-English * 50% Correct = 25% Correct

50% + 25% = 75% Correct overall.

Because any time there are two choices, it is safe to assume equal distribution?

Mr Ascii:

jpers36:

mondokat:

One of two buttons... that's 75%. Yeah, those statistics sound right.

Assuming 50% English and 50% non-English, that's pretty much right.

50% English * 100% Correct = 50% Correct
50% Non-English * 50% Correct = 25% Correct

50% + 25% = 75% Correct overall.

Because any time there are two choices, it is safe to assume equal distribution?

Yes, according to Mueller's postulate in the Law of Numbers

Understanding english isn't a binary fluent/completely incapable variable...I'd guess lots of people can read yes, no, and english even if they don't understand much more than that. It might work OK.

It's odd, though.

Re: the second one... Someone should have told them that a preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with.

Zemyla:

The first one is understandable. "NO" is very similar in most Indo-European languages (no, non, nyet) so most people will recognize the "no" button, and quite probably the word "English".

Exactly. I mean, I know how to say "do you speak $LANGUAGE" in at least two languages (French and German) I otherwise know very little of. I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar in reverse. (Though the "and understand" may throw someone for a loop.)

Tim B:

"The good news here is that the airplanes themselves don't run Internet Explorer."

However the Boeing 787's entertainment system does run on Windows. You won't drop out of the sky, but don't get too wrapped up in that showing of Shrek 3 either.

Somewhat ironic that you posed that directly after someone complaining that the Linux-based entertainment system on their flight crashed.

The airport one reminds me of this one I took:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/renanbirck/2123612999/

The image is blurry, but it is the standard you-are-running-low-on-virtual-memory thing.

The worst thing is that this was spread across many displays on the same airport.

Last time i check, a random boolean was statistically supposed to be close to 50%...

You don't have to lie about % on TDWTF, we are not your boss.

zx75:

Вы говорите русского?

ROFL. If you rely on Babelfish, you're in for some serious laughing at.
(The correct translation is "Вы говорите по русски?", obviously.)

Mr Ascii:

Was that ever in doubt?

You must be new here. 8=]

Ozz:

Re: the second one... Someone should have told them that a preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with.

An interface has too many methods to fire events from, ASSHOLE!!

java.lang.Chris;:

Binks:

Those who can't understand English will probably push No, as it's the only word there that's in Spanish.

Which is great, as Spain is of course where all British people go on holiday, carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh because they "overdid it on the first day. And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Cameron should be running this country and how many languages Boris Johnson can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X', food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...

FACT: THEDAILYWTF WAS FUNNY WHEN WE WERE ALL 12 LIVING IN THE SUBURBS LISTENING TO LINKIN PARK WATCHING DRAGONBALL Z DRINKING PEPSI WHILE PLAYING HALO CO-OP ON THE EASIEST SETTING DURING WHICH WE CONSUMED DORITOS AND LOOKED AT PAINTBALL GUNS ON EBAY IN INTERNET EXPLORER CONNECTED THROUGH AOL ON A 56K MODEM BEFORE HOPPING INTO OUR BALDING FATHERS' LATEST MIDLIFE-CRISIS-IMPULSE-SPONSORED JAPANESE-BUILT SUV TO HEAD TO THE MALL AND GET MORE SKATEBOARDING SHOES AND THIRD-RATE IRREGULAR LEVIS AND MOUNTAIN BIKE PARTS BEFORE HEADING HOME, VOTING DEMOCRAT AND MASTURBATING TO THE LATEST SEARS CATALOG WHILE HUFFING PAINT IN YOUR GARAGE BEFORE TALKING TO PEDOPHILES ON AIM PRETENDING TO BE WHATEVER CAMWHORE THEY'RE RANTING ABOUT ON MYSPACE WITH A MATRIX QUOTE/ANIME CHARACTER NAME/TRIPLE SIX-ASTERISK-PARENTHESES-SURROUNDED SCREENNAME BEFORE HEADING TO YOUR SUPPOSED "GOOD SCHOOL" IN THE MORNING TO BUY MORE POT TO SMOKE DURING YOUR COUNTER-STRIKE LAN PARTY WITH JIMMY AND THE REST OF HIS FRIENDS TAKING RITALIN AND ADDERALL AND PROZAC EIGHT TIMES A DAY BEFORE TAKING A CASUAL PASS AT LOCAL, STATE OR NATIONAL GOVERNMENTIAL FIGURES, LEGISLATURE, OR STRUCTURE TO APPEAR EDGY AND INTELLIGENT IN FRONT OF YOUR BUDWEISER-SNEAKING, LIMP-WRISTED, NEAR-TO-COLUMBINE SOCIOPATHIC "DEEP" FRIENDS WHO PLAY THE VICTIM WHEN THEY START LOSING ARGUEMENTS SIX DAYS BEFORE THEIR BOTCHED SUICIDE ATTEMPT SIMPLY BECAUSE SCHOOL TRAMP NUMBER TWELVE WOULDN'T GO UNDER THE BLEACHERS WITH THEM TO LET THEM GET TO SECOND BASE BEFORE THEIR THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY.

Zemyla:

The first one is understandable. "NO" is very similar in most Indo-European languages (no, non, nyet) so most people will recognize the "no" button, and quite probably the word "English".

This makes it relatively simple for the people who don't speak English to select the right answer.

I'm from Eastern Europe and I didn't recognize anything. I certainly wouldn't know how to answer that question. I'd probably panic and be left with permanent emotional scars.

Carl:

Last time i check, a random boolean was statistically supposed to be close to 50%...

You don't have to lie about % on TDWTF, we are not your boss.

I think they assumed that 1/2 of the people reading the message could read English and would get the answer correct. Of the remaining, 50% of the total, only 1/2 would get the answer correct by random guessing. Hence 75% correct.

Instead of "An interface has too many methods to fire events from" the message (most probably) should be "The operation cannot be performed because the pins are not connected".

They have the same error code - 0x80040209.

Peter Gordon:

The top picture is not a WTF. They printed it in a really big font, and as all british tourists know, shouted english is just as good as speaking a foreign language, and the natives always understand perfectly. The only way to improve it would have been something like:

CAN-O YOU
READ-O AND
UNDERSTAND-O
THE ENGLISH-O?

Maybe with some animated hand-waving somehow.

Basil Fawlty, is that you?

You are assuming the user would like to select no "No" to begin with. If you don't understand the language you simply wouldn't know that you wanted to select 'No'. For example:

Invidunt ut rebum ipsum vero accusam et stet invidunt del?

Yes or no?

CAPTCH: abbas - A large fish that resides in many lakes and is very tastey.

L2Spell....
*CAPTCHA
*tasty

Devek:

Pyro:

Well those who can't understand English will probably push any button randomly, so the interface is at least 75% working :)

You obviously have no experience with end lusers. Those who speak English will always push any button randomly.

Ever wondered why it takes the person in front of you so long to get money out of the ATM when it takes people like us a few seconds? It takes them awhile to brute force all the button combinations until they get what they want, green stuff they can buy beer with.

Great, now all my cubical mates are wondering what I'm laughing at. Thanks a lot!

Anonymous:

java.lang.Chris;:

Binks:

Those who can't understand English will probably push No, as it's the only word there that's in Spanish.

Which is great, as Spain is of course where all British people go on holiday, carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh because they "overdid it on the first day. And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Cameron should be running this country and how many languages Boris Johnson can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X', food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...

FACT: THEDAILYWTF WAS FUNNY WHEN WE WERE ALL 12 LIVING IN THE SUBURBS LISTENING TO LINKIN PARK WATCHING DRAGONBALL Z DRINKING PEPSI WHILE PLAYING HALO CO-OP ON THE EASIEST SETTING DURING WHICH WE CONSUMED DORITOS AND LOOKED AT PAINTBALL GUNS ON EBAY IN INTERNET EXPLORER CONNECTED THROUGH AOL ON A 56K MODEM BEFORE HOPPING INTO OUR BALDING FATHERS' LATEST MIDLIFE-CRISIS-IMPULSE-SPONSORED JAPANESE-BUILT SUV TO HEAD TO THE MALL AND GET MORE SKATEBOARDING SHOES AND THIRD-RATE IRREGULAR LEVIS AND MOUNTAIN BIKE PARTS BEFORE HEADING HOME, VOTING DEMOCRAT AND MASTURBATING TO THE LATEST SEARS CATALOG WHILE HUFFING PAINT IN YOUR GARAGE BEFORE TALKING TO PEDOPHILES ON AIM PRETENDING TO BE WHATEVER CAMWHORE THEY'RE RANTING ABOUT ON MYSPACE WITH A MATRIX QUOTE/ANIME CHARACTER NAME/TRIPLE SIX-ASTERISK-PARENTHESES-SURROUNDED SCREENNAME BEFORE HEADING TO YOUR SUPPOSED "GOOD SCHOOL" IN THE MORNING TO BUY MORE POT TO SMOKE DURING YOUR COUNTER-STRIKE LAN PARTY WITH JIMMY AND THE REST OF HIS FRIENDS TAKING RITALIN AND ADDERALL AND PROZAC EIGHT TIMES A DAY BEFORE TAKING A CASUAL PASS AT LOCAL, STATE OR NATIONAL GOVERNMENTIAL FIGURES, LEGISLATURE, OR STRUCTURE TO APPEAR EDGY AND INTELLIGENT IN FRONT OF YOUR BUDWEISER-SNEAKING, LIMP-WRISTED, NEAR-TO-COLUMBINE SOCIOPATHIC "DEEP" FRIENDS WHO PLAY THE VICTIM WHEN THEY START LOSING ARGUEMENTS SIX DAYS BEFORE THEIR BOTCHED SUICIDE ATTEMPT SIMPLY BECAUSE SCHOOL TRAMP NUMBER TWELVE WOULDN'T GO UNDER THE BLEACHERS WITH THEM TO LET THEM GET TO SECOND BASE BEFORE THEIR THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY.

What a silly bunt.

One thing in their defense.

Many people who could not manage a complex sequence of screens in English might know what "Yes" and "No" meant.

Just like I might, if I was in Germany (since I don't speak or read German) might well understand a screen that said:

SPRECHEN ZIE DEUTSCHE?

<JA> <NEIN>

If it got that all spelled correctly.

And then I'd know to press NEIN.

If I'm lucky I'd get a menu of other languages.

Has anyone else noticed the major UI WTF in the "Can you read and understand english?" dialog?

The dialog has a close button in the toolbox area. I'm itching to see what happens if it is clicked.