The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-01-11 Reply Admin

QJo:
Call me Mister Slowcoach, but is it not the case that 65535 and FFFF return different colours?

The "&" at the end probably makes all the difference in the world. Hell if I know what, vendor-specific shit always sucks.

2013-01-11 Reply Admin

AN AMAZING CODER:
It has to do with coordinating that effort with everyone around the world as well.
Sure, you can get up an hour earlier... but then what? Do you go to work earlier and leave earlier? What if you can't?

Actually, the sort of jobs where you need to coordinate with people around the world are generally the sort of jobs where you don't need daylight that much. They're mainly office jobs.

(Things like travel don't count, as while they're coordinated around the world, and daylight helps, they normally just happen in their own time anyway, not related to a '9 to 5' life)

The sort of jobs where daylight will be a real benefit tend to only have timing relationships locally - eg farming, building, road maintenance, schools etc.

As long as there's an overlapping time period (eg for shops, government services etc), it doesn't really matter if some work on a different 'work day' to others. In fact, having, for instance, schools run from 7am to 1pm and office workers work from 9 to 5 may actually help with traffic congestion etc.

2013-01-11 Reply Admin

dkf:
Umm:
This was written in the early nineties but the code is in SVN???
Doesn't mean that the code was originally committed to SVN, just that someone has committed it since. (It could have been originally in CVS or RCS or even — $DEITY help us — SCCS; there are tools for migrating.)

Back in my day when we wanted to do diffs we'd take the new punch card and put it on top of the old punch card and hold it up to the light.

And we were happy.

2013-01-14 Reply Admin

dkf:
Umm:
This was written in the early nineties but the code is in SVN???
Doesn't mean that the code was originally committed to SVN, just that someone has committed it since. (It could have been originally in CVS or RCS or even — $DEITY help us — SCCS; there are tools for migrating.)

I've worked places where source code was "archived" by putting a paper printout in a filing cabinet, as backup for the punch cards/mag tapes. Don't laugh - they don't crash during power failures and they're impervious to magnetic fields. Fire, however, can be problematic.

2013-01-15 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
lmm:
Steve The Cynic:
I think you'll find that "BST" is abbreviationese for "British Summer Time". And the UNIX epoch is normally quoted as 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, even if that isn't necessarily the right time zone/standard.
And the British don't use BST in the middle of January, even if it is sometimes hard to tell British summer and winter apart.

You've fallen for one of the classic blunders. British January is indeed usually UTC, but that particular January was on British Standard Time.

"British Standard Time" - no, no, no - British Summer Time. It was an experiment to see whether it was better to have darker mornings and lighter evenings. It was just about getting light by 9 a.m. It was great.

...and this is why everyone should operate on UTC.

2016-04-21 Reply Admin

So... Given that the parameter is passed across as a string, why not simply add the standard color names to the list of cases and then new applications can use something sensible without breaking the old ones?

Just because you can't make it beautiful doesn't mean you can't make it easier to use.

Color Me Stupid

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