Comment On Fortune Not Found

I can't see the WTF with the Dell computer

I can't see the WTF with the Dell computer

Well, you can either have no webcam, or pay an extra $46 for no webcam

If you pay for the premium "No Webcam" option, how can you tell if they didn't just rip you off and give you the el-cheapo "No Webcam" option?

Take a deep breath, indeed!

looks like an upgrade to the next level is a 2 MP camera... Don't know if I'd want the 1 MP, we'd look like dos games on the screen.

An error occurred when closing the application. Do you want to quit anyway?

Even worse is when it only offers you the choice between debugging, restarting it immediately or restarting it after looking for a solution on the internet.

Crap! Visual studio just crashed. Do I want to debug it with itself or using a new instance?

pitchingchris:

looks like an upgrade to the next level is a 2 MP camera... Don't know if I'd want the 1 MP, we'd look like dos games on the screen.

Oh ye spoiled younkers!
VGA's 320x200 is a mere 64k pixels.
1M pixels means a resolution of about 1152x864.

How ridiculous is it to be concerned with the number of capital letters in a name?
Are they, in a feeble way, attempting to thwart "leet speak"?

pitchingchris:

looks like an upgrade to the next level is a 2 MP camera... Don't know if I'd want the 1 MP, we'd look like dos games on the screen.

What are you on about? The options were: No webcam (included), No webcam ($46) and 2MP webcam ($23).
And since even a 1MP camera is a significant portion of most people's screen sizes (1024*760=~0.8MP, 1280*1024=~1.3MP, even 1600*1200<2MP) it would hardly look like "DOS games" (which typically ran at 320*240=~0.075MP or 640*480=~0.37MP).

Is that first one an Error'd or a Photoshopp'd?

It's a geeky joke.

For option A they just put a sticker on the webcam and pretend it's not there.

The webcam was soldered on the motherboard, that's why you'll have to pay more to remove it in option b rather than including it.

The fortune is an intentional "joke", not a printing error, although perhaps it's WTF-y that they're still using a joke that hasn't been relevant since the DOS 3.3 days.

Facebook's restriction on capital letters also interferes with a convention often used with names from locales where family name traditionally precedes given name, such as Japan. Romanized Japanese names are often written with the family name in all capitals so that readers can tell which is which regardless of order. (E.g., the creator of Super Mario might give his name either as 'Shigeru MIYAMOTO' or 'MIYAMOTO Shigeru'.)

The Dell one would make sense if the default option were an integrated webcam, but they would remove the component for a fee in order to accomodate purchasers with security policies forbidding webcams. But that's not what the site says.

vt_mruhlin:

Is that first one an Error'd or a Photoshopp'd?

It very well may be a joke fortune - I know one person who opened a fortune cookie to get a message along the lines of "SSoorrrryy,, llooccaall eecchhoo ttuurrnneedd oonn.." - sometimes they like to throw in fortunes to give the recipient a good laugh rather than some Confucius-ism.

Alex, are you feeling left out that nobody's given you a mug yet?

It's not a WTF, it's an intentional joke, and you and the submitter seem to have completely missed it.

How ridiculous is it to be concerned with the number of capital letters in a name?

Obviously, their web service is programmed in COBOL and they were afraid of COBOL injections taking control of their server.
To secure it, the programmer applies a few algorithms to recognize COBOL code: Number of capital letters, number of words.
Because the logic behind a capital letter counter is too complex, a neural network is used.

Fortune Not Found in Bed:
Abort, Retry, Ignore?

Quietust:

It very well may be a joke fortune - I know one person who opened a fortune cookie to get a message along the lines of "SSoorrrryy,, llooccaall eecchhoo ttuurrnneedd oonn.." - sometimes they like to throw in fortunes to give the recipient a good laugh rather than some Confucius-ism.

And where are you guys eating that gives such nerdy fortunes? The CyberGeek Chinese Cafe?

http://www.soundtempest.net/soc/imgswf/sponsoredshit.png
"Shop and compare great deals on shit and other related products at MonsterMarketplace."

Also, I had trouble signing up for Facebook, on account of my name being Andy Goth. I had to send them an email with some personal information before they would believe that was really my name. Hmm. But after signing up and seeing the sheer number of people named Gothickitty, I understood.

My favorite fortune: "Help, I'm a prisoner in a Chinese bakery!"

pJohn_viera__dash__mc_eldowney should learn to follow the personal identity programming style guide.

Dell lost the parentheses in formatting the Web page. Your choices are:

No (Webcam Option), $0 - You take what we give you. Maybe a camera. Maybe a tazer.

Webcam Option, $23 - It's just a camera. And it's always on. And it feeds to bedroomspy.com.

(No Webcam) Option, $46 - Freedom has a price.

Lucky numbers: 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9

vt_mruhlin:

Is that first one an Error'd or a Photoshopp'd?

Technically neither. It's a purposeful joke, not a computer error. I've gotten this fortune before, was going to send in a pic of it (on a wooden table), but I'm too lazy.

AlpineR:

Lucky numbers: 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9

That's amazing; I use the same combination on my luggage!

- Mixed-metaphor man

ParkinT:

How ridiculous is it to be concerned with the number of capital letters in a name?
Are they, in a feeble way, attempting to thwart "leet speak"?

I HaVe No IdEa WhAt YoU aRe TaLkInG aBoUt, wHaT iS wRoNg WiTh HaViNg MaNy UpPeRcAsE lEtTeRs In A mEsSaGe?

Quietust:

vt_mruhlin:

Is that first one an Error'd or a Photoshopp'd?

It very well may be a joke fortune - I know one person who opened a fortune cookie to get a message along the lines of "SSoorrrryy,, llooccaall eecchhoo ttuurrnneedd oonn.." - sometimes they like to throw in fortunes to give the recipient a good laugh rather than some Confucius-ism.

Those are both fairly well known fortunes - in the standard UNIX fortune program.

I'm really curious as to why anyone would use the UNIX fortune file to print actual fortune cookie fortunes, since it does contain things like that. (And if they're using the -o option - more.)

The local echo in that fortune refers to a local terminal that's echoing characters along with the remote terminal also echoing characters.

No, REALLY?!

Congratulations on being the first idiot not to get the joke and have to explain it to everyone, proving yourself to be a complete idiot.

Have a nice life.

Facebook says my fairly common last name is not appropriate. I can only imagine what happens to users named Richard that prefer to go by the common shortened form.

I can't understand why they need to be so strict in deciding what name is appropriate or not.

I've had this nick rejected before, because it was "inappropriate." I had to look at it for a minute to figure out what the problem was. To be fair, it was a site which likely had a lot of kids (games part of a candy company site).

0 False
1 True
2 FortuneNotFound

Rootbeer:

The fortune is an intentional "joke", not a printing error, although perhaps it's WTF-y that they're still using a joke that hasn't been relevant since the DOS 3.3 days.

What? I only started using computers after that (DOS 5 or 6), and I remember seeing that a lot.

Hell, Win95 and maybe later in that line would display either a dialog with abort, retry, and ignore buttons or a blue screen; it's been a while so I forget which.

mallard:

pitchingchris:

looks like an upgrade to the next level is a 2 MP camera... Don't know if I'd want the 1 MP, we'd look like dos games on the screen.

What are you on about? The options were: No webcam (included), No webcam ($46) and 2MP webcam ($23).
And since even a 1MP camera is a significant portion of most people's screen sizes (1024*760=~0.8MP, 1280*1024=~1.3MP, even 1600*1200<2MP) it would hardly look like "DOS games" (which typically ran at 320*240=~0.075MP or 640*480=~0.37MP).

The true WTF is that CCD camera pixels can NOT be directly compared to a monitor's pixels which any idiot should know!

In a colour LCD monitor a "pixel" is actual a group of 3 monochrome RGB pixels, hence a 1600x1200 colour LCD panel is somewhat comparable (the eye is not equally sensitive to the all colour channels) to a monochrome 4800x1200 pixel panel when considering luminance (considering this when rendering is known as sub-pixel rendering).

While colour CCD cameras instead tend to quote their Mega-pixels in terms of the number of single chroma receptors, and then use fancy tricks to upscale/fudge the chromanance's resolution accordingly. Also the accuracy of individual pixels can be plagued by noise (also requiring interpolation with neighboring pixels).

So as 1 CCD camera "pixel" is approximately equivalent to 3 LCD monitor "pixels", therefore a 1MP camera should would be better compared to only a 640x480 resolution LCD panel!

I has your Lucky Numbers *evil kitty grin*

8879Factor:

How ridiculous is it to be concerned with the number of capital letters in a name?

Obviously, their web service is programmed in COBOL and they were afraid of COBOL injections taking control of their server.
To secure it, the programmer applies a few algorithms to recognize COBOL code: Number of capital letters, number of words.
Because the logic behind a capital letter counter is too complex, a neural network is used.

COBOL injection??

Oh, I get it, it would be like:

ADD 1 TO 010-SECURITY-LEVEL GIVING 040-ADMIN-ACCESS.

nat42:

The true WTF is that CCD camera pixels can NOT be directly compared to a monitor's pixels which any idiot should know!

In a colour LCD monitor a "pixel" is actual a group of 3 monochrome RGB pixels, hence a 1600x1200 colour LCD panel is somewhat comparable (the eye is not equally sensitive to the all colour channels) to a monochrome 4800x1200 pixel panel when considering luminance (considering this when rendering is known as sub-pixel rendering).

While colour CCD cameras instead tend to quote their Mega-pixels in terms of the number of single chroma receptors, and then use fancy tricks to upscale/fudge the chromanance's resolution accordingly. Also the accuracy of individual pixels can be plagued by noise (also requiring interpolation with neighboring pixels).

So as 1 CCD camera "pixel" is approximately equivalent to 3 LCD monitor "pixels", therefore a 1MP camera should would be better compared to only a 640x480 resolution LCD panel!

Actually, most CCDs and CMOS camera sensors use a Bayer pattern, so it's almost 4 pixels to 1 screen pixel (though the interpolation moves around enough to generate 4 pixels of data. There is also extra receptor sites on a CCD for specific purposes - another few rows and columns around the active area to help with interpolation, and rows of sensors covered in black to get the local black level as well (this is to form a baseline on "zero" light). Streaking on the final image is often caused by light penetrating these black cells.

Of course, there's also the Foveon sensor, which has a 3 cells for every pixel as well.

Of course, since digital cameras are used to shoot real life things, the Bayer pattern doesn't hurt too badly. I'm sure most people don't notice similar things happening with video as well (4:4:4 vs 4:2:2 vs 4:2:0).

What I really wonder about is what they will do, if somebody buys that laptop with no webcam for one dollar a month but stops paying after seven months.

Captcha ideo (shouldn't that have been video?)

AlpineR:

pJohn_viera__dash__mc_eldowney should learn to follow the personal identity programming style guide.

Dell lost the parentheses in formatting the Web page. Your choices are:

No (Webcam Option), $0 - You take what we give you. Maybe a camera. Maybe a tazer.

Webcam Option, $23 - It's just a camera. And it's always on. And it feeds to bedroomspy.com.

(No Webcam) Option, $46 - Freedom has a price.

Lucky numbers: 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9

Dell's stupid; I'd pay a LOT extra for a built-in tazer on my laptop.

Kasper:

What I really wonder about is what they will do, if somebody buys that laptop with no webcam for one dollar a month but stops paying after seven months.

Captcha ideo (shouldn't that have been video?)

The webcam keeps working fine but Dell hires a collection agency to deal with the delinquent account and prosecute the unpaid amount in court.

Then again, maybe there is a Dell Genuine Advantage program now that they can disable remotely... :P

m:

vt_mruhlin:

Is that first one an Error'd or a Photoshopp'd?

It's a geeky joke.

I'm now waiting for this section to start featuring lolcats. Those are even more error'd than this particular effort. "HAH HAH! THEY SPELLED 'THE' WRONG!"

I wonder if the generator has had those fifty-line fortunes stripped out of its database?

James Schend:

Dell's stupid; I'd pay a LOT extra for a built-in tazer on my laptop.

Why would you pay extra? That's a standard feature on the Dell:

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49295100,00.htm

Rootbeer:

The fortune is an intentional "joke", not a printing error, although perhaps it's WTF-y that they're still using a joke that hasn't been relevant since the DOS 3.3 days.

Uh, Vista still contains Abort, Retry, Fail in both text and GUI varieties. It's only irrelevant on non-MS systems.

Should I be worried if the quit-anyway-message makes perfect sense to me? If the application saves it data on closing and there was an error, you might reconsider closing it.

They leave a hole where the webcam would have gone. That's why the premium No Webcam costs twice as much as getting the webcam - you pay $23 to have it inserted, and another $23 to have it removed.

Alternatively, you can pay Dell $1 per month, so that they make sure that no one is adding a webcam to the notebook. Now THAT'S security services!

MadJo@Work:

I HaVe No IdEa WhAt YoU aRe TaLkInG aBoUt, wHaT iS wRoNg WiTh HaViNg MaNy UpPeRcAsE lEtTeRs In A mEsSaGe?

I have a nice WYSE terminal, where if you type while holding CapsLock down, EvErY KeYpReSs tOgGlEs cAsE.

So, maybe Caps Lock is actually the cruise control to 1337?

Anon:

No, REALLY?!

Congratulations on being the first idiot not to get the joke and have to explain it to everyone, proving yourself to be a complete idiot.

Have a nice life.

If only there was a button which allowed you to quote the comment you're replying to, so people could tell what had upset you.

Considering he hit the reply button on the post, I think it's relatively safe to assume he was responding to the post id displayed...

Lucky Number: 404

Pidgeot:

RayS:

If you pay for the premium "No Webcam" option, how can you tell if they didn't just rip you off and give you the el-cheapo "No Webcam" option?

They leave a hole where the webcam would have gone. That's why the premium No Webcam costs twice as much as getting the webcam - you pay $23 to have it inserted, and another $23 to have it removed.

Y'know, that sounds just like a girl I once met in downtown Philadelphia. Enterprisey young lady, that... and four bucks under the market rate (although I can't remember what the sales tax was at the time).

haha, I hadn't noticed that Reply to XXX before.

> "Under what circumstance," Jim Leonard wonders, "would someone click 'No'?"

Under the circumstance where you rely on the application to save on exit. Especially if you haven't saved for a while.