Comment On I Hope You Brought Your Discount Card

Seems a lot like Scotty: "It'll take 10 hours, I'll see to it that I get it done in 6, Captain."

Then after 4 hours he comes again and shines as the best engineer ever...

I second this.

Can you volunteer to pay the regular price, instead of the discount?

OK, you got me this time: I'll admit this one got me thinking 'WTF'...

Can someone explain to me the logic that must have been used to calculate 1.17 * $3.99 = -$429492?

f@

Am I the only one who feels a little hesitant to buy meat on special? I saw a steak at the grocery store this week that was labeled as a "manager's special" and "priced for quick sale". I decided to skip it...

Zuc:

Can you volunteer to pay the regular price, instead of the discount?

No, the trick is to buy it with your discount card, then go back and get a refund without your discount card. Tell them since you lost your receipt, you'll take the refund on an in-store credit card. Hooray, $4300.

Actually, you'd probably just get this for free, since if it scans at $4300, you can say, "Uh, this doesn't weigh a ton. Can you use your scanning code of practice, please?" Most stores will give you one mis-scanned item for free.

By that picture, you just lost a lot of money! That sticker says the regular price is -429492. That's $429,492 that they owe you for buying it! I'm all for that deal.

Anon:

Am I the only one who feels a little hesitant to buy meat on special? I saw a steak at the grocery store this week that was labeled as a "manager's special" and "priced for quick sale". I decided to skip it...

Meat priced like that is meant to be consumed or frozen on that day. It's generally safe to eat, BUT it might also be subject to a recall. That's very rare, but happens sometimes. WTFs aren't reserved to coding. Kind of gives you a chill, doesn't it - there are people in all industries as clueless as the boneheads featured here. ("The intern used a freakin' medical scalpel to cut out the intestines. WTF?")

themagni:

Zuc:

Can you volunteer to pay the regular price, instead of the discount?

No, the trick is to buy it with your discount card, then go back and get a refund without your discount card. Tell them since you lost your receipt, you'll take the refund on an in-store credit card. Hooray, $4300.

Actually, you'd probably just get this for free, since if it scans at $4300, you can say, "Uh, this doesn't weigh a ton. Can you use your scanning code of practice, please?" Most stores will give you one mis-scanned item for free.

Uh, the actual price is -429492.00. The discount is 4294.00.

I would buy it at the regual price. Whatever it is, it cannot be that bad that it's not worth getting that amount of money with it ;)

Or, the actualy "you pay" price should be -433786.00 ;)

f@:

Can someone explain to me the logic that must have been used to calculate 1.17 * $3.99 = -$429492?

that's an integer overflow ... MAX_INT on 32bit is 4294967295 ...

Meat on special just means, "cook this today, don't leave it in the frig for a week."

Where's the "Use By" date on the packaging? The sell by date is useful enough for the store to know when to remove the goods from sale, but some products last quite a bit longer.

You usually see far steeper reductions on food that's on or near the use by date, even if it would be good for another day or two in reality.

The real WTF is that the picture was not taken in a wooden table...

CAPTCHA: pointer - I've never get those iN C

Romeo:

The real WTF is that the picture was not taken in a wooden table...

CAPTCHA: pointer - I've never get those iN C

It'd be hard to see it if it were in a wooden table.

Looks like they may be using integer math with fixed point to do the calculation, but had the value initialized to 0xFFFFFFFF. Since this is about meat and uninitialized memory, it seems appropriate to say: Where's the 0xDEADBEEF?

So grey WTFs are lame images?

I could care less about Certified Angus Beef.

Give me good old home-raised grass-fed beef any day.

it's obviously a status code of some sort. Most programmers prefer 999999... or the like, but this is clearly of the same ilk.

Wonder what it means, aside from don't trust the price on the package...

Paul D. should send that pic in to Consumer Reports. They love that stuff.

CAPTCHA: pirates! Arr!

"Where's the Beef?!"

Okay, so I looked up CAPTCHA on Wikipedia and I get the concept, but I haven't understood even one of the dozens of "CAPTCHA" lines I've seen in these comment pages.

CAPTCHA: pointer - I've never get those iN C

CAPTCHA: pirates! Arr

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

it means they got the CAPTCHA "pointer" when they tried to reply, and felt like making a Social Commentary out of it.

Mine says "howdy", so, if I were toeing the line, I would say:

CAPTCHA: howdy - Hey howdy hi!

Does that help?

Puzzled in Peoria:

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

They're intended to be funny. They're reporting the word they had to type in to post that comment, often with a "witty" comment tying that phrase to the subject at hand.

As best I can tell, the only purpose it serves, other than to act as a rotating signature readers have to ignore, is to allow a robot to scan the forums for lines of the form /CAPTCHA:\s*(\S+)/ and build a database of the (quite limited, given how many repeats I see) list of possible words used by the CAPTCHA library and either brute-force spam in directly or dictionary attack the CAPTCHA image and have a much greater chance of successfully posting spam despite the CAPTCHA.

The Real WTF is that Americans call minced beef "ground beef". You make it by putting it through a mincer, not a grinder! Hence, minced beef.

Mincer: http://img.alibaba.com/photo/50563452/Meat_Mincer.jpg

Grinder: http://www.hr-hardwarecom/img/grinding-machine-angle-grinder/grinding-machine-angle-grinder-HA81253.jpg

The scary thing is that I worked on this system about 10 years ago. It was a mess, but functioned, and I thought they had tests to avoid this sort of thing. Maybe not!

Puzzled in Peoria:

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

I think they are in fact *intended* to be funny. That they are not is an insignificant detail to the mindless herd of captcha-posters.

that's an integer overflow ... MAX_INT on 32bit is 4294967295 ...

Hmmm... So because the value -$429492 is signed, they use signed 33-bit integers representing 4-decimal values? Intriguing.

Thanks for the explanation. I too was wonder WTF CAPTCHA's are.

I would try to "buy" it at the regular price. I wonder how long I could keep up the argument that they owe me 400,000+ dollars.

I once got a OxBAADF00D error message - I fixed that beef though

Alien426:

Seems a lot like Scotty: "It'll take 10 hours, I'll see to it that I get it done in 6, Captain."

Then after 4 hours he comes again and shines as the best engineer ever...

Some hardcore trekkies believe he was joking when he said that.

Haha that is great. Maybe the beef is from a "mad cow?"

Midget Master
www.allaboutmidgets.typepad.com

The total price was represented as a fixed-precision integer, in hundredths of a cent; it was $4.7296, or 0x0000B8C0. The most significant bit (the sign) was flipped, probably due to a hardware error, producing 0x8000B8C0. This is the value that was printed.

There's no WTF here, just a random, obvious hardware error, probably caused by noisy power lines or cheap equipment. It almost certainly wasn't the fault of any programmer.

jimrandomh:

There's no WTF here, just a random, obvious hardware error, probably caused by noisy power lines or cheap equipment. It almost certainly wasn't the fault of any programmer.

Bollocks.
Assuming your assertion that this is a sign problem, what about parity, CRC, etc? This certainly was the fault of a programmer.

m0ffx:

The Real WTF is that Americans call minced beef "ground beef". You make it by putting it through a mincer, not a grinder! Hence, minced beef.

Mincer: http://img.alibaba.com/photo/50563452/Meat_Mincer.jpg

Grinder: http://www.hr-hardwarecom/img/grinding-machine-angle-grinder/grinding-machine-angle-grinder-HA81253.jpg

The real WTF is that you would be so anal as to point that out and even provide links. I mean, I could point out how stupid it is to conjugate verbs with groups as if they were plural, and call julienne fried potatoes "chips", but I'm not a troll. Oops...

f@:

OK, you got me this time: I'll admit this one got me thinking 'WTF'...

Can someone explain to me the logic that must have been used to calculate 1.17 * $3.99 = -$429492?

f@

It's in base -1337.

f@:

Can someone explain to me the logic that must have been used to calculate 1.17 * $3.99 = -$429492?

axo:

that's an integer overflow ... MAX_INT on 32bit is 4294967295 ...

Um, that doesn't help me. I can't multiply just-over-one by nearly-four and flow over four-point-two-billion.

f@

CAPTCHA:

burned

Well, you are if you don't take the 'before discount' price.

Bollocks.
Assuming your assertion that this is a sign problem, what about parity, CRC, etc? This certainly was the fault of a programmer.

Bollocks to THAT. Software never does CRC or parity checks on its intermediate calculations because if you assume that random memory errors are possible, you have to also assume that the code that checks for them won't work correctly either. That type of check has to be done in hardware or it won't work, and doing it requires quite a few extra transistors that are usually not worth paying for.

Puzzled in Peoria:

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

I wondered about these for the longest time also. I guess people are trying to be clever. Meh. I'd prefer them to go away, but I've given up hope.

freakshow:

Puzzled in Peoria:

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

I wondered about these for the longest time also. I guess people are trying to be clever. Meh. I'd prefer them to go away, but I've given up hope.

Today's your lucky day! I wrote a Greasemonkey script that will remove stupid captcha statements in comment posts. You can get it here.

I tried to write it such that it will chop off only the affected lines of the comment (ie, if the captcha was in a quote of someone else's post, or if there is any text after the captcha in the same post), and I've only seen it fooled by the person in this article who included a regex for the very thing I chop out in the middle of the post (it cut off the rest of his paragraph).

Otherwise, I am blissfully unaware of the annoying, compulsive, irrelevant, and downright non-humorous interpretations of a random bot-defeating word that posters too lazy to to get an account feel it necessary to divulge.

boolean:

Today's your lucky day! I wrote a Greasemonkey script that will remove stupid captcha statements in comment posts. You can get it here.

I tried to write it such that it will chop off only the affected lines of the comment (ie, if the captcha was in a quote of someone else's post, or if there is any text after the captcha in the same post), and I've only seen it fooled by the person in this article who included a regex for the very thing I chop out in the middle of the post (it cut off the rest of his paragraph).

Otherwise, I am blissfully unaware of the annoying, compulsive, irrelevant, and downright non-humorous interpretations of a random bot-defeating word that posters too lazy to to get an account feel it necessary to divulge.

Awesome! I'll sacrifice a virgin for you, donate a kidney to you, or name my firstborn after you!

Puzzled in Peoria:

Okay, so I looked up CAPTCHA on Wikipedia and I get the concept, but I haven't understood even one of the dozens of "CAPTCHA" lines I've seen in these comment pages.

CAPTCHA: pointer - I've never get those iN C

CAPTCHA: pirates! Arr

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

<sarcasm> Hey, guys - look: more fresh meat ... </sarcasm>

freakshow:

boolean:

Today's your lucky day! I wrote a Greasemonkey script that will remove stupid captcha statements in comment posts. You can get it here.

I tried to write it such that it will chop off only the affected lines of the comment (ie, if the captcha was in a quote of someone else's post, or if there is any text after the captcha in the same post), and I've only seen it fooled by the person in this article who included a regex for the very thing I chop out in the middle of the post (it cut off the rest of his paragraph).

Otherwise, I am blissfully unaware of the annoying, compulsive, irrelevant, and downright non-humorous interpretations of a random bot-defeating word that posters too lazy to to get an account feel it necessary to divulge.

Awesome! I'll sacrifice a virgin for you, donate a kidney to you, or name my firstborn after you!

So your firstborn is to be called Boolean Freakshow ?!?

I'd like to see that - can you post some pics when convenient, please?

cklam:

So your firstborn is to be called Boolean Freakshow ?!?

I'd like to see that - can you post some pics when convenient, please?

The firstborn had better be one of triplets while we're on the subject...

As a former meat clerk at a supermarket...

You are usually OK. That stuff is mostly just near its expiration date. Near being the operative word. You get in deep shit for even risking expired product being out for sale.

Just make sure you use it within a day or two and you should be fine. If you are concerned, just make sure you cook it completely instead of rare. Even expired meat is usually edible after thourough cooking.

Look at the bar code: 2 80295 30350 9

The 0350 near the end means it'll ring up as $3.50.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Product_Code#Prefixes

Puzzled in Peoria:

Okay, so I looked up CAPTCHA on Wikipedia and I get the concept, but I haven't understood even one of the dozens of "CAPTCHA" lines I've seen in these comment pages.

CAPTCHA: pointer - I've never get those iN C

CAPTCHA: pirates! Arr

What's the deal? Are they intended to be funny? Would someone please take pity and 'splain why these lines appear in the comments?

My question is why do they seem to bother some people here so much? It's not really that different than a .sig. The things people get bent out of shape over...

mincers and pincers and julienne fried taters
and 0XBAADf00D

Good stuff! You folks are a riot!

and, oblivious to the flipped bit arguments, the CRC hardware checking comments... along comes a pseudorandom ex-meat-clerk to offer shopping tips!

Har har dee harhar!

I'm in the US, close to the Canadian border. I've long been desensitized to the diff between reading colour/color and centre/center... but it still throws me for a loop reading "whinge" when the writer apparently meant "whine".

For me, the greatest WTF in my readings here so far is wonderment toward WHY someone would care to seek attribution -- by registering and having their given name displayed atop thier comment(s). Yeah, posting as alogged in user would preclude dealing with CAPTCHAs... but for a just-passin-thru poster that would be a one-off interruption would be non-issue. So do ya ever pull each other's leg? Do ya ever taunt "Bungelica Woh" by typing anonymously and entering "Bungelica_Woh" in the YourName field, in an attempt to put words in poor Bungelica's mouth? Hah! I just couldn't believe that would be an ACTUAL real-life name (Bungelica Woh) but I googled it and sure enough, Bungelica graduated from Harvard in 1995 and has attained a quite distinguished career. Okay, kick me and call me provincial.

I just stumbled in here by following a link while reading about captchas (er about cracking them, actually): "the 1st reason is that i was pissed off by the whole rel='nofollow' thing that blog engines have been implementing. i think its a total hack, and wanted to submit it to the The Daily WTF. if you don't know, its a tag that the major search engines are now looking for in hyperlink tags. if the link tag has this value, then the link will not be used for page ranking. so it is supposed to take away the motivation for comment spammers to post." No, I didn't really find the name Bungelica by performing a web search. In fact, I didn't even search. If you did, hah made ya look, nyah nyah, but it's all in good fun, eh?

Again, good stuff! warm thanks to the many participants here.

meijer doesn't have discount cards. everyone gets the sale price without your purchases being tracked. and that is just one of the 4294 reasons why it is awesome and should be a national chain.