• Zock (unregistered)

    At first, I thought the WTF is PBoJ appearing to market online banking as a new service. It actually took me a while to notice the date.

  • matt (unregistered) in reply to A.T.
    A.T.:
    I'd rather ask myself: who is micheal failure and why do I want to notify him?

    Ohhh! This site was about him for a time.

    Michael's code is particularly bad, but when people code even WORSE than Michael, it would end up on Worse Than Failure.

  • Kristofer (unregistered) in reply to täheke
    täheke:
    The speed of light might very well be 670 mph in a sufficiently translucent environment.
    Okay, I laughed.
  • (cs) in reply to täheke
    täheke:
    The speed of light might very well be 670 mph in a sufficiently translucent environment.

    But "the" speed of light is always the speed of light in a 100% vacuum....

  • Grovesy (unregistered) in reply to dtech
    dtech:
    täheke:
    The speed of light might very well be 670 mph in a sufficiently translucent environment.

    But "the" speed of light is always the speed of light in a 100% vacuum....

    I only have a vague grasp of ‘relativity’, but if I understand correctly it all depends on the size of your frame of reference... if you took a small measurement, even right next to a black hole then yes, your measurement of the speed of light would be the typical published value for 'c'

    If on the other hand, you took the measurement over a large enough area then things such as the curvature of space, and gravitational effects would change the speed of light…

    Or to say it another way, if you are measuring it in flat space, in a 100% vacuum then yes, c= the accepted published figure… In curved space it all gets a bit complex.. I think… sure someone with a much better understanding will correct me on the finer points of this,

  • Zack (unregistered) in reply to täheke

    Well duh. The speed of light was probably measured in a school. Everyone know you have to slow down near a school.

  • Grovesy (unregistered) in reply to Zack

    Or the discworld maybee

  • APH (unregistered) in reply to Ru
    Ru:
    Did you know that the original name for the AES algorithm was Rijndael? What the fuck? Even the pronounciation for that is a WTF.
    Settle down. Ease off the coffee. Read a little. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijndael http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard_process

    Rijndael is a portmanteau of the two creators' names for the encryption system which eventually was used for the AES standard.

  • Monkey Brains (unregistered) in reply to Grovesy
    Grovesy:
    I only have a vague grasp of ‘relativity’

    You are mistaken; you have no grasp of relativity. Oh wait, I meant ‘relativity’. TRWTF is your post.

  • (cs) in reply to shadowman
    shadowman:
    It looks like the CDC fixed their bmi calculator. Oh well, I was hoping to get in on the fun.
    No, they haven't. It still thinks Brian Dawkins is overweight.
  • Rookierookie (unregistered) in reply to fcardenas
    fcardenas:
    Premier Bank IT Dept:
    Remember how Y2K happened over eight years ago?

    Nonsense. It isn't due to happen for another 891 and a bit years. We've got plenty of time to fix things.

    Sorry, I forgot to add the quote:

    In less than 30 years, in fact

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

    You need John Titor.

  • Sean Hagen (unregistered)

    The 'notify_michael_failure' has to do with wireless clients trying to exchange authentication keys. It's a weird name, I know.

    The company that I work for manufactures 802.11abg clients and AP's, and on the statistics page there's a count for 'bad michaels', which leads to interesting questions about who Michael is and why is he bad?

  • JustChris (unregistered)

    I guess Wii Fit uses the same BMI calculator as CDC. That game caused a bit of controversy after calling a 4'9" girl weighing 6 stone "fat". That translates to a BMI of about 18. Not overweight by any means.

  • Nick (unregistered)

    I remember noticing that mistake in thelondonpaper too! I kept my copy in my room meaning to do something with it, but sadly my scanner used a different light speed so the two weren't compatible (wavelengths and all that).

  • Michael (unregistered)

    What did you guys want to tell me?

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I checked one of those "body mass" charts at my doctor's office. It says I'm two inches too short for my weight. I'll have to do some stretching exercises.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I've noticed that when the newspapers talk about something that I actually know about -- science or computers or occasionally some event that I had some personal involvement with -- they get important facts wrong over half the time.

    So why do I believe them when they talk about things that I know nothing about?

  • Jay (unregistered)

    Hey, I think the time stamps on these posts are inaccurate. When someone in Europe submits a post, the message, even if it is travelling at the speed of light, should take at least four or five hours to get here.

  • Eric (unregistered) in reply to shadowman
    shadowman:
    It looks like the CDC fixed their bmi calculator. Oh well, I was hoping to get in on the fun.

    Actually, I don't think it was ever broken. Just look at the URL generated and change result_underweight to result_obese and you can generate that page.

  • ydrol (unregistered)

    Fixed already http://www.premierbanksonline.com/ Unless it only occurs on May 20th :)

  • Dazed (unregistered) in reply to Frunobulax
    Frunobulax:
    Don't worry about spoiling the fun, it's already happened at least four times already. Anyone else?
    Yep, still a few to follow.

    Can anyone think of a way to make people actually read the comments before they throw in the umpteenth saying the same thing? Perhaps if the link from the article page read "All 42 comments" instead of "All comments" people might actually consider the possibility that their literary gem wasn't original? (Yes, I am an incorrigible optimist.)

  • Christian Vogel (unregistered) in reply to Therac-25
    Therac-25:
    The site generating the 108 as a year is probably written in Perl.

    Perl5's localtime() function will return the year as "Year - 1900" by default, so you have to add 1900 to it after you get it out. Yes, very annoying, Perl6 needs to get out already.

    That's hardly Perl's fault. It's just the way the POSIX localtime-function is defined, returning a struct tm:

    struct tm { ... int tm_year; /* years since 1900 */ ... }

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to JonC
    JonC:
    Looks like The London Paper dishing out duff information about the speed of light.

    It's not like they've got it confused with the speed of sound either as it's too low for that. I'm intrigued to find out what their quoted source was as it's too blurry to read in the photo.

    Using my amazing blur-reading skills I deduced that it reads "Source: en.wikipedia.org", make of that what you will.

  • Mark (unregistered)

    TRWTF, of course, is sourcing Wikipedia.

  • (cs) in reply to Dazed
    Dazed:
    Can anyone think of a way to make people actually read the comments before they throw in the umpteenth saying the same thing?
    I think the problem is that the article is followed by a small number of "blessed comments," which some users seem to think is all the comments there are. Maybe adding the total number of comments, as you suggest, and a better indication that the comments shown are an excerpt of the whole, would be better.
  • matt (unregistered) in reply to Zack
    Zack:
    Well duh. The speed of light was probably measured in a school. Everyone know you have to slow down near a school.

    I think you're right.

    Traffic around here does tend to at 1/1000000 of its normal speed when near a school.

  • I am not a robot (unregistered)

    I wonder what Premier Bank's financial calculators are like?

    If they use that kind of math everywhere, it could be very profitable, so long as you got your money out before the errors went the other way.

  • Henrik (unregistered) in reply to täheke
    täheke :
    The speed of light might very well be 670 mph in a sufficiently translucent environment.

    The real WTF is your post. Seriously what do you mean by that?!?!?

  • Ric (unregistered)

    comment[0]: ieee80211_notify_thedailywtf_failure

  • (cs) in reply to Grovesy
    Grovesy:
    I've come close to punching them... I've already come close to putting my boot up the arse... wanted to just pummel the person to death... had to stop myself from doing a sprinting close line on the person who... I feel like I really might just snap... I would just end up taking it out on the test manager... calling the project manger all sorts of (probably true) things...

    I’m quite happy I’m not working in London at the moment.

    I imagine London is even happier. What's up, can't get a valium scrip?
    Grovesy:
    I think then my anger peaks, and starts to wayne...
    Give Wayne my condolences.
  • (cs) in reply to JonC
    JonC:
    Looks like The London Paper dishing out duff information about the speed of light.

    It's not like they've got it confused with the speed of sound either as it's too low for that. I'm intrigued to find out what their quoted source was as it's too blurry to read in the photo.

    Again, their source is correct; they just omitted the word "million". The speed of light is about 670.6 million miles per hour.

  • SantaC311 (unregistered) in reply to täheke

    670.6 is right if you're stating the speed in millions and allow for a bit of inaccuracy. Who says you can't round universal scientific constants?

  • ErikTheRed (unregistered)

    Actually, Michael is the name of part of the WiFi protocol stack that checks MAC address integrity. But the log message is amusing nonetheless.

  • (cs)

    The real WTF are 2x9-sudokus.

  • wtf'er (unregistered) in reply to täheke

    Yes, light can be slowed...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light

  • (cs)

    the notify Michael is not a WTF!!!11shift+1 but in fact is used in wireless encryption.

    Oh and also, the newspaper just left out the word million. (670 million mph) is the speed of light...

    Just thought I'd let you guys know...in case you were wondering...or not wondering...

  • JonC (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    JonC:
    Looks like The London Paper dishing out duff information about the speed of light.

    It's not like they've got it confused with the speed of sound either as it's too low for that. I'm intrigued to find out what their quoted source was as it's too blurry to read in the photo.

    Using my amazing blur-reading skills I deduced that it reads "Source: en.wikipedia.org", make of that what you will.

    That's clearly the problem then. They must have looked at the page the day I edited the speed of light in Wikipedia.

  • Cap'n Shazbot (unregistered)

    Urgh. This is the JS used for that bank's date display:

    if (document.all)
	{
	year = myDate.getYear();
	}
else
	{
	year =myDate.getYear() + 1900;
	}

    Besides the brokenness of adding 1900 to a ctime()-style year, there's the test for whether or not the user is running that awesome new Netscape browser. I imagine someone saying to themselves, "This code will automagically detect the difference between the only two Web browsers that will ever be available!"

  • (cs)

    Back in the old old days of Mac programming, if you had Macsbug and hit a memory manager error you were very likely to see the function _Jackson in your stack trace.

    As it happened, the memory management expert where I worked was also named Jackson. We had a customer who knew this and was convinced our Jackson was to blame for his Mac crashing.

  • Pat (unregistered) in reply to JonC
    JonC:
    Looks like The London Paper dishing out duff information about the speed of light.

    It's not like they've got it confused with the speed of sound either as it's too low for that. I'm intrigued to find out what their quoted source was as it's too blurry to read in the photo.

    If you're so intrigued, just look up the speed of light in mph. It's not like it's a huge mystery. They just dropped the word million.

  • (cs) in reply to JonC
    JonC:
    It's not like they've got it confused with the speed of sound either as it's too low for that.

    No it's about right: Speed of sound is about 300 m/s and Google tells us this is 671 miles/hour.

    http://www.google.com.au/search?q=300m%2Fs+in+miles%2Fhour&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

  • Slater (unregistered)

    If c*10^-6 is wrong then I don't want to be right.

  • (cs)

    Is that an ear michael problem?

  • (cs)

    So a bank has a Y2K problem... Big deal. They'll fix that in 2100. Bender said so.

    And the speed of light one hardly matters. Scientists are increasing the speed of light again in 2208 so that we can travel faster.

  • Ian Hawdon (unregistered)

    CDC - What the anorexics want to hear!

  • (cs)

    Maybe the speed was correct but they edited the comment to make it fit?

    "the number of miles per hour at which a typical light aircraft travels with the wind behind it"

  • (cs) in reply to neepheed
    neepheed:
    Maybe the speed was correct but they edited the comment to make it fit?

    "the number of miles per hour at which a typical light aircraft travels with the wind behind it"

    "Light aircraft" "670.6mph" ? I have got to get me one of those !

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to Saint Gerbil
    Saint Gerbil:
    That's "the london paper" for you.

    Its also about as accurate as they get.

    The thing is, newspapers are written by journos, and the typical journo has next to no scientific training. The joke is, though, while checking the veracity of a new story can be a lengthy and involved process, even then often producing an article that is less than 100% accurate, confirming a simple fact like this one would have taken next to no time (unless someone had vandalised the relevant Wikipedia page at the time). What's more, a few moments with a calculator would have shown it could not possibly be correct: at that rate, it would take light from the Sun 12 years and 3 months to reach Earth.

  • Santa (unregistered) in reply to täheke

    A simple way to explain it would be that both speed and time itself are relative...

  • (cs) in reply to Paolo G
    Paolo G:
    What's more, a few moments with a calculator would have shown it could not possibly be correct: at that rate, it would take light from the Sun 12 years and 3 months to reach Earth.
    In order to understand why such a sanity check would be a good idea, your journo would need a modicum of scientific training. Even assuming that, he would then need to know or look up both the Earth's orbital radius, and the accepted value for the light travel time. I would suspect that neither of these are more likely to be stuck in his poor, overloaded brain cell than is the correct value for c itself.

    [Edit: oops, broke the quote. Fixed now.]

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