• Kempeth (unregistered)

    You know the one about the Irish guy at a job interview?

    When the interview started it was soon apparent that the guy was not really qualified for the job but the Irish man insisted that he was a fast learner and a quick thinker. So the company rep thought: well, maybe he can be trained. Let's see if what he says is true.

    Rep: "I'm gonna give you a riddle. If you can solve it then we'll think about it... How would you represent the number Nine without using numbers or words."

    The Irish guy took a sheet of paper and drew three Trees on it. The Interviewer was a bit puzzled and asked how that represents the number Nine.

    Irish: "Easy. Tree and tree and tree is 9!"

    "Ok, smarty" thought the interviewer, "How would you represent 99 under the same restrictions?"

    The Irish man took the sheet and drew a smudge on each tree. When he handed it back he saw the confused look on the interviewer and began to explain:

    "Dirty Tree and dirty tree and dirty tree is 99!"

    "Alright. For the last test how would you represent 100 then?"

    The Irish guy took the sheet back and drew a black blob near each tree and triumphantly explained: "Dirty tree and a turd plus dirty tree and a turd plus dirty tree and a turd equals 100!"

  • TTY (unregistered)

    Access 2.0 was a very demanding memory intensive application on Windows 3.1, on a 386 with 8MB of memory.

    Windows 95 on a Pentium with 24MB was more robust, and large applications like Access 2.0 didn't normally cause any problems. Although any report that took longer than an hour to run was suspect.

  • James Rain (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    Currency is not floating point. Currency is not floating point. Currency is not floating point.

    You can store as an integer number of cents, or you can use one of the new-fangled fixed-point decimal types that some DBs have.

    In no way should an account ever have $1/3.

    Yes, some implementations use a floating point to approximate currency. These implementations inevitably run into rounding errors as a result of this decision that would otherwise have been resolved when the data was coerced to a currency type.

    Fortunately, the 8086 used in the IBM PC supports BCD (Binary Coded Decimal). Dropped in later hardware (the 80486 includes a Floating Point processor instead, to support applications like MS Excel), but those programmers who really really don't approve of floating point financial calculations are welcome to use the appropriate processor.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    "Yes," she said, "I backed it up as soon as the system crashed."

    I had exactly the same in the 80s, to make it worse the secretary kept on backing up the corrupte data repeatedly until the entire cycle of good backups was over-written.

  • populous (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    JamesQMurphy:
    frits:
    dkf:
    a wooden table, a pigeon and a 3 gallon vat of lube.

    Sounds like a party!

    Not without Irish Girl!
    She's still working on the tree problem.
    Yay for more wooden tables!
  • (cs) in reply to populous
    populous:
    operagost:
    JamesQMurphy:
    frits:
    dkf:
    a wooden table, a pigeon and a 3 gallon vat of lube.

    Sounds like a party!

    Not without Irish Girl!
    She's still working on the tree problem.
    Yay for more wooden tables!
    That can be only good news for those who carpent.
  • a man with the shades (unregistered) in reply to Small carpenter
    Small carpenter:
    Giant Caperpenter:
    F150:
    A troll is a middle-English word for "giant."

    Yeah, I don't think so.

    From Norwegian, Danish or Swedish troll, from Old Norse troll, possibly related to the Middle High German trolle (“spook, wraith, monster, ogre”) [1]. Compare Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) trylle (“to bewitch”), Danish trylle (“to perform magical arts”) and Swedish trolla (“to conjure”).

    From Middle English troll (“to go about", "to stroll", "to roll from side to side”), from Old French troller (French trôler) and Middle High German trollen (“to stroll”); fishing sense possibly influenced by trawl

    No, i think so.

    YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHH!

  • Irish Boy (unregistered)

    Don't get too upset about the tree/three thing. My parents are Irish with very strong accents, which they can adjust when speaking to people if necessary, but the only people who seem to ever make fun of it in a superior way are from the south of England.

    I went to school in England and I remember when I was about 6 been asked to participate in a survey about accents, which was actually just very posh English kid and a teachers aide recording phonetically how I spoke, and talking about me as if I spoke another language and wasn't in the room.

    When I pointed out that I could understand their 'big' English words, and that I could mimic their accents they seemed very surprised. Not just because I spoke back, but that I had said that they had accents.

    I've never encountered this 'we are superior' attitude anywhere else in the UK, having traveled to most parts of it.

  • (cs) in reply to AnonPaddy
    AnonPaddy:
    Ok, I ment 'The Nerve' is probably a troll, not the user nor the tech support person.

    Finally - Calling out a troll is usually a healthy act in comments. 'The Nerve' in this case misinterpreted the situation and then made an inflammatory commentary on that misinterpretation, that is typical troll behavior. I explained their mistake, but also felt like acknowledging that I realised they probably knew the truth anyway, but were just being confrontational for kicks.

    In Nerve's example there were two possibilities: A) The person had authorization and still got a no authorization message. B) The person didn't have authorization and didn't understand/read the message.

    Since you misinterpreted the situation and disagreed with the possibility that B exists, you made an inflammatory comment by calling The Nerve a troll.

    I've seen B happen more often than A. The Nerve wasn't trolling.

  • An Old Hacker (unregistered)

    Is there a difference between "trolling" and "flamebaiting"? If not, then I suggest, contra ER, that the "troll" of "trolling" is the noun, not the verb.

  • An Old Hacker (unregistered)

    On floating point & currency:

    JUST DON'T. I spent four years doing floating point validation at AMD. (I'm a mathematician.) ALL processors have round-to-integer support for floats. If you data comes in bad, (that is, as a float) set the rounding mode & send it to the integer unit.

  • Quad (unregistered)

    To quote merton:

    "three,three, three,three, three,three, three,three, mother $%#@ing THREE!"

    This dude is serious about the number three.

  • (cs) in reply to Anon

    I was wondering if anyone would figure out that the genital syncing was second life.

    In my experience, it's usually more sluts then hookers, though...

    And don't get me started on the furries.

  • (cs) in reply to frits
    frits:
    dkf:
    a wooden table, a pigeon and a 3 gallon vat of lube.

    Sounds like a party!

    No, just sounds like a Tuesday to me.
  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to James Rain
    James Rain:
    Fortunately, the 8086 used in the IBM PC supports BCD (Binary Coded Decimal). Dropped in later hardware (the 80486 includes a Floating Point processor instead, to support applications like MS Excel), but those programmers who really really don't approve of floating point financial calculations are welcome to use the appropriate processor.
    I'm pretty sure you can still use the DAA / DAS opcodes in 32 bit mode, though not in 64 bit mode though. This is all irrelevant though - you don't need DAA / DAS to implement BCD arithmetic, and the fixed point decimal types could be implemented using binary integers instead of BCD anyway.
  • SB (unregistered)

    Clearly that user failed her Web 0.1 test.

    She should have taken a screenshot, printed it out, placed it on a wooden table, taken a digital a photo of it, printed that out, scanned it as a PDF and then emailed it.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to @Deprecated
    @Deprecated:
    foo:
    I asked "did you back up the data like the work instruction says?"

    "Yes," she said, "I backed it up as soon as the system crashed."

    So? You said they kept a week's worth of copies of the database.

    Just guessing here: they didn't bother to run a backup until after a problem occurred.

    Well, of course-- the system wasn't down until then, so they didn't need to run the program that brings it back up.

    --Joe

  • EvenMoreAnonymous (unregistered)

    Let's summarize:

    1. The support person makes fun of the software choices of the customer.

    2. The support staff mocks the accent of the customer.

    3. The customer is probably in a secure location where you can neither save nor email from the browsing machine, though you can print (extremely common in secure settings). The support staff is apparently too ignorant to realize this is a possibility.

    4. Even knowing that the end users are extremely non-technical, the support staff writes misleading instructions and mocks the end user when the instructions are followed to the letter.

    This is why everybody hates calling tech support. You get people who are dumb as bricks but convinced they're smarter than anybody else.

  • EvenMoreAnonymous (unregistered) in reply to Joe

    BTW, I realize it's kind of rude to be logical, but back in the days of Access 2 most backup scripts locked the db file, ran Compress and Repair on the file, copied it to backup, then unlocked it. Compress and Repair was something you wanted to run every few days because it fixed simple corruption issues, which was a constant problem with Access files, but there was no simple way to run it from within a locked-down Access application.

    So if the end user had a problem, the first step in troubleshooting was always to have them run the backup script, which usually fixed the problem.

  • Liviu (unregistered)
    A user at our company had an issue with a web app she was using. So she took a screenshot, printed it out, scanned it as a PDF, and emailed it to me.
    This seems to me, as a programmer, terribly hilarious. So much effort to accomplish the task because she didn't connect the dots (in her head) that she already had it all digitized and simply sending the screenshot as an attachment would have done the trick. Good thing is all users learn little by little and improve themselves with respect to digital skills.
  • US Hyperg33k (unregistered)

    LOL HAVE U SEEN HOW THERE WAS "DILDO" OR SO BELOW THE BLACK TEXT!!! D.I.L.D.O.!!!!

  • (cs) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Carpentry, godammit!

    /trollfood

    Spam spam spammity spam. Does Akismet still work if I disable Javascript? I can't be arse to find out.

    TRWTF is developers who have a hard time slipping past Akismet. Which makes me wonder if Akismet is smarter than you.

  • (cs) in reply to Fred
    Fred:
    static:
    Haegin:
    TRWTF is using floating point numbers for pricing

    Aye.

    I've almost had stand-up arguments with developers who thought it was fine to use floating point for a currency value. facepalm

    Like Excel does.
    Actually, Excel uses the Currency type for Currency. You can control it by selecting the cells you want and then clicking the "$" icon on the toolbar. Then go into VBA, get a reference to the Range.Value, and inspect it to see that it is in fact storing it in the Currency part of VARIANT.

    You can also force-cast them by going through each cell and setting Range.Value = CCurr(Range.Value).

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to TheRealNagesh
    TheRealNagesh:
    Alex:
    foo:
    Bushea:
    RE:Accentricity Yep. As someone who's lived in Ireland a few years it gets annoying with the THomas (pronouncing the TH) and T(h)ree, the Ta (to) etc..

    Dammit. It's english. There's rules.

    Free advice: Never visit the US.
    Or Australia.
    Or New Zealand. Or Canada. Or Devon, or Cornwall, or Scotland, or Wales, or Lancashire, or Cheshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire, or any other place where they claim to be able to speak English.

    Basically, never venture out of Kent or the Home Counties.

    Good advice. Best to avoid those uncivilised savage lands infested with natives. Best to avoid Slough, too.

  • biff (unregistered) in reply to Giant Caperpenter
    Giant Caperpenter:
    F150:
    by:
    AnonPaddy:
    The Nerve:
    I don't know why I have to explain error messages like this.

    "Why can't I see the page?"

    "What does it say? What do you think?"

    lern2reed

    Perhaps the user had authorization, but the program was genuinely acting up.

    Or more likely - you're a troll.

    How is he being a troll? Man, people use the troll word like someone is going to take it away...

    CAPTCHA: incassum > use the word troll everywhere for everyone incassum-one takes it away

    And incorrectly, I might add. "Troll" is supposed to be a verb. Someone who trolls would be a troller. A troll is a middle-English word for "giant."

    Yeah, I don't think so.

    From Norwegian, Danish or Swedish troll, from Old Norse troll, possibly related to the Middle High German trolle (“spook, wraith, monster, ogre”) [1]. Compare Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) trylle (“to bewitch”), Danish trylle (“to perform magical arts”) and Swedish trolla (“to conjure”).

    From Middle English troll (“to go about", "to stroll", "to roll from side to side”), from Old French troller (French trôler) and Middle High German trollen (“to stroll”); fishing sense possibly influenced by trawl

    Wait, there's more:

    A person who posts to a newsgroup, bulletin board, etc., in a way intended to anger other posters and to cause drama, or otherwise disrupt the group's intended purpose.

    May I also add that it is perfectly fin English to noun a verb and vice versa. For example, one who engages in carpentering is a carpenter.

    In former times trolls were like bad gnomes who lived under bridges and demanded tribute or ransom for the passage of goods and services over the bridge... Today, their status has considerably improved, as they now live in little houses ON the bridges and troll ways to demand their ransoms... these small houses became known as 'troll booths'...

  • biff (unregistered)

    The backup story reminds me of the days back when we ran removable media hard drives (remember those?) And mych disciplin ewas required in the event of trouble.... The inviolate rule was that you ran daily backups to daily alternating media as an absolute bare minimum.... more is better, and off site backups were preferrable if for no other reason than the current person running the system couldn't immediately get their hands on them...

    Anyway, this company had their offices in an old house. The computer was in the basement... (a wtf in itself) Which meant the the secretary in charge of running the backups, had to go outside and around back to go down the steps to run the backups... And at first, she did the daily backups. Then they became every other day, then once weekly... then....? Backups represent a cost in effort, time and expense that have no discernable benefit.... until you need them... Then came the inevetible day, when the hard drive crashed.... Oh the system has an error... and it hasn't been backed up in 6 months, 6 months of hard work putting in all our customer data, running accounts recievable, and payables, and since everything was computerized why keep paper records..... We better back it up quick! Uh oh, this disk isn't working either.... Better try that other one....

    One of the bad things about removable media drives is that they were susceptable to dirt, which would cause crashes, and another is that if you had one crashed drive, inserting another good disk pack into that failed drive would crash it, as well... And so, if proper discipline was not observed to isolate the faulty disk/drive combination to one drive, the disk crashes would be probagated to all drives on teh system as one after another would be tried and crashed.

    The company, having no idea what orders it had, who it owed, and who owed it, simply went out of business..

    Saepius : homo saiepius - human like or having to do with humans

  • (cs)
    When I opened up the screenshot, I immediately realized that it wasn't our sotware
    Hopefully it wasn't "his hardware" instead!
  • V. Garg (unregistered) in reply to frits

    And then you took a screenshot of the PDF to post here!!!

    The cycle repeats!!

  • only me (unregistered) in reply to TheRealNagesh
    TheRealNagesh:
    Alex:
    foo:
    Bushea:
    RE:Accentricity Yep. As someone who's lived in Ireland a few years it gets annoying with the THomas (pronouncing the TH) and T(h)ree, the Ta (to) etc..

    Dammit. It's english. There's rules.

    Free advice: Never visit the US.
    Or Australia.
    Or New Zealand. Or Canada. Or Devon, or Cornwall, or Scotland, or Wales, or Lancashire, or Cheshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire, or any other place where they claim to be able to speak English.

    Basically, never venture out of Kent or the Home Counties.

    I was never so embarrassed as when I met my cousin ( who is from Birmingham ) and I couldn't understand a word he said. Seriously, not one word. Not even the greeting he gave me.

  • Berkery (unregistered)

    Screenshot

    Last year I was taking a similar support call on the phone, and the user wanted to fax the error message to me. Whilst trying very hard not to laugh, I agreed, I'd never received a fax before. And never since.

  • (cs) in reply to static
    static:
    Haegin:
    TRWTF is using floating point numbers for pricing

    Aye.

    I've almost had stand-up arguments with developers who thought it was fine to use floating point for a currency value. facepalm

    Usually people who have never been taught what a computer really is and what it's limits are. Unfortunately a lot of people in this field are largely self-educated. While this can be fine, it often leads to gaps in their knowledge that they're not even aware they have.

    As to explaining rounding errors, I'd say start with this:

    10/3 = 3.3 3.3 + 3.3 + 3.3 = 9.9

    and then elaborate with something like 3.33 + 3.33 + 3.33 = 9.99 = 10.0

    presto 0.1 difference!

    Now ask them what happens if you do that a million times.

  • trwtf (unregistered) in reply to RogerWilco
    RogerWilco:
    static:
    Haegin:
    TRWTF is using floating point numbers for pricing

    Aye.

    I've almost had stand-up arguments with developers who thought it was fine to use floating point for a currency value. facepalm

    Usually people who have never been taught what a computer really is and what it's limits are. Unfortunately a lot of people in this field are largely self-educated. While this can be fine, it often leads to gaps in their knowledge that they're not even aware they have.

    As to explaining rounding errors, I'd say start with this:

    10/3 = 3.3

    But you're completely wrong. 10/3 = 3.33'. That's a completely different number. I would argue that anyone who sucks that hard at math has no authority to be explaining rounding errors in the first place.

  • MOH (unregistered) in reply to WhiskeyJack

    The real WTF is that he wasn't concerned that all his prices were in dollars

  • JMU (unregistered)

    Probably someone already mentioned it, but the creepiest thing of the screenshot is the web browser used.

  • Kay Kyser (unregistered)

    WTF? The 'Accentricity' story is mine - and the issue had nothing to do with storing prices in an INT field. The story is about a misunderstanding between English and Irish accents.

    (The prices were accidentally sent up by the client's EPOS system and had nothing to do with the website).

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    oh, that backup story reminded me of a Star Trek book: Scotty told someone to "make some new parts, just like the old parts", and wound up with brand new, BROKEN parts! "even the jagged edges and scorch marks were identical!"

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