The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Chelloveck:
Multiply by 2 and add 30, just as Bob and Doug McKenzie taught us. That's all the precision you need for any temperatures dealing with weather. At least, for dealing with weather anywhere you don't need protective gear that's *much* more serious than a jacket and toque! Take off, ya hoser!

Nice. I've been using the Bob and Doug formula for at least 30 years.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Dan:
Zombies don't vote. They're looking for brains.

Won't find them amongst Tea Party Repubs.

chubertdev · 2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Friedrice The Great:
Dan:
Zombies don't vote. They're looking for brains.
Won't find them amongst Tea Party Repubs.

That would be a subset of the target of that joke, yes.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Friedrice The Great:
Dan:
Zombies don't vote. They're looking for brains.
Won't find them amongst Tea Party Repubs.

Or for that matter, anyplace where people think insulting each other counts as debating the issues.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Regarding the temperature scale debate going on here:

Fahrenheit: historically 0 °F = coldest temperature during the 1708/1709 winter in Gdańsk; 96 °F = body temperature of a healthy human; now 32 °F = freezing point of water, 212 °F = boiling point of water Celsius: historically 100 °C = Freezing point of water; 0 °C = Boiling point of water; now reversed

So both of those scales were set more or less randomly, and none of those is like "more useful", since there are more than two temperatures you commonly need.

The Kelvin scale (and it's Fahrenheit pendant, don't ask me about the name) were introduced for easier calculations in physics and don't really have a use out of it.

Now why are you arguing about it? Both scales were randomly defined, and both are commonly used, only in different countries.

If you want to make a universal scale, I suggest using the Planck scale, with 0 being absolute zero and 1 being the Planck temperature (maximum possible temperature), since that has both points at physically relevant points. For reference, that would mean water freezes at 1.9279·10⁻³⁰.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Jerry:
Friedrice The Great:
Dan:
Zombies don't vote. They're looking for brains.
Won't find them amongst Tea Party Repubs.
Or for that matter, anyplace where people think insulting each other counts as debating the issues.

Such as on the Daily WTF comment pages, then?

chubertdev · 2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Some random guy:
Regarding the temperature scale debate going on here:
Fahrenheit: historically 0 °F = coldest temperature during the 1708/1709 winter in Gdańsk; 96 °F = body temperature of a healthy human; now 32 °F = freezing point of water, 212 °F = boiling point of water Celsius: historically 100 °C = Freezing point of water; 0 °C = Boiling point of water; now reversed

So both of those scales were set more or less randomly, and none of those is like "more useful", since there are more than two temperatures you commonly need.

The Kelvin scale (and it's Fahrenheit pendant, don't ask me about the name) were introduced for easier calculations in physics and don't really have a use out of it.

Now why are you arguing about it? Both scales were randomly defined, and both are commonly used, only in different countries.

If you want to make a universal scale, I suggest using the Planck scale, with 0 being absolute zero and 1 being the Planck temperature (maximum possible temperature), since that has both points at physically relevant points. For reference, that would mean water freezes at 1.9279·10⁻³⁰.

I was always taught that it's 98.6 F for a human body, so I guess that it hasn't changed too much.

But the point of that scale being usefull isn't the points where phase transitions occur for water, it's to give more meaning between the full increments. If you say the weather is going to be in the 20s Celsius, it doesn't mean nearly as much as saying that the weather will be in the 70s Fahrenheit.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

in Chicago dead people still vote.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Yojin:
Glad to see that I'm not the only one that developed a mental tic about that math.
Also the real WTF is Celsius. What moron develops a system that puts 0 at the temperature that fresh water freezes at a few hundred feet above sea level.

Better to use good old Fahrenheit where 0 correlates to the average temp on the coldest day in the winter and 100 is the average temp on the hottest day in the summer. Which is generally true for everyone living 45th parallel (average longitude!).

That way you can always say, "On a scale of 0 to 100 what's the temp outside", instead of saying "On a scale of -17 to 37 what's the temp outside?"

Works for me! Yu Es Ay! Yu Es Ay!

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Klimax:
Warren:
Of course you want the older version, e.g. Windows 7 vs 8 Office 2003 vs 2007

Nope.

Yep.

2014-05-02 Reply Admin

Dan:
Zombies don't vote. They're looking for brains.

+1 from me. +1 from my dearly departed.

2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Where I'm from the record high is 34.4C and low -0.6C, so 0 to 100 is normally OK. Living anywhere with regular sub-zero (BELOW FREEZING - are you nuts?) is TRWTF

Watson · 2014-05-03 Reply Admin

The email Ari S received reads like the literary equivalent of twinkies.

The ingredients that are not there to fool your brain into thinking communication is occurring are there to preserve the ingredients that are there to fool your brain into thinking communication is occurring.

2014-05-03 Reply Admin

What worries me about most of the dead people voting by absentee ballot is that it wasn't all of them. Can the polling stations not identifies zombies?

2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Nobody seems to have picked up on one point that does bother me. I have several friends who don't identify as gender binary, and so do not identify as Mr or Ms (or the other versions offered).

dkf · 2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Gerry:
Living anywhere with regular sub-zero (BELOW FREEZING - are you nuts?) is TRWTF

It's called “proper clothing” and it works really quite well.

dkf · 2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Some random guy:
The Kelvin scale (and it's Fahrenheit pendant, don't ask me about the name) were introduced for easier calculations in physics and don't really have a use out of it.

The name of the temperature scale that you're looking for is “Rankine” and nobody uses it.

2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.

Watson · 2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.

Except that gender is optional and all the options for title are gender-specific.

"We aren't going to require you to tell us your gender; we have other ways of obtaining that information."

Watson · 2014-05-03 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
I was always taught that it's 98.6 F for a human body, so I guess that it hasn't changed too much.

That's what you get if you convert 37°C (which is itself approximate because human bodies aren't that homogeneous) into Fahrenheit and fail to discard the spurious precision.

2014-05-03 Reply Admin

..moto G.... However, I was less impressed when I attempted to use Motorola's lost phone functionality

Haha. I WAS impressed with the lost phone service on my "moto G". This went as follows...

After using the phone for a few days I disabled the only application that used more juice than what my screen uses. In fact all other applications used less than 25% of what my screen is said to use, so it was a big battery hog. That one application was "Motorola help". I don't need any HELP. Then I tried the motorola lost phone service, and it didn't work. I asked Motorola for help and they promply replied to use the google lost phone service under: http://www.google.com/android/devicemanager . Works great! I later found out that the Motorola help APP was also supposed to be responsible for the lost-phone features.....

Daniel15 · 2014-05-03 Reply Admin

Interesting, I used to work at the company responsible for the third screenshot (with the title and gender fields). I think title is normally optional but I guess that client decided to modify the configuration and make it mandatory. No clue why they're showing the gender field as it does infer it from the title.

Zecc · 2014-05-04 Reply Admin

Watson:
Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.
Except that gender is optional and all the options for title are gender-specific.
"We aren't going to require you to tell us your gender; we have other ways of obtaining that information."

It would have been great if they had explained this in the article, but instead all they wrote was

"So, the Gender field is 'optional', yet the Title field is marked as mandatory and all choices are gender-specific," Ben writes.

2014-05-04 Reply Admin

Why not? For me 20c means indoor room temperature. Only becauce it means nothing to you, doesent mean that it has no meaning. Like: Varför inte? För mig är 20 grader normal innomhustemperatur. Bara för att det inte betyder något för dig, betyder det inte att det saknar betydelse.

2014-05-04 Reply Admin

Some random guy:
Regarding the temperature scale debate going on here:
Fahrenheit: historically 0 °F = coldest temperature during the 1708/1709 winter in Gdańsk; 96 °F = body temperature of a healthy human; now 32 °F = freezing point of water, 212 °F = boiling point of water Celsius: historically 100 °C = Freezing point of water; 0 °C = Boiling point of water; now reversed

So both of those scales were set more or less randomly, and none of those is like "more useful", since there are more than two temperatures you commonly need.

The Kelvin scale (and it's Fahrenheit pendant, don't ask me about the name) were introduced for easier calculations in physics and don't really have a use out of it.

Now why are you arguing about it? Both scales were randomly defined, and both are commonly used, only in different countries.

If you want to make a universal scale, I suggest using the Planck scale, with 0 being absolute zero and 1 being the Planck temperature (maximum possible temperature), since that has both points at physically relevant points. For reference, that would mean water freezes at 1.9279·10⁻³⁰.

Must've been some genius to decide "Jmm, let's call the temperature of a healthy human 96 just so that we can have the boiling point of water at 212"....

FWIW, in my anti-Farenheit country I'd always been taught a healthy human was a 100 (and assumed that's how the scale was created - which makes as much sense as basing int on the freezing/boiling point of water).

As for someone else's comment about "temperature in the 70s F" being more useful than "in the 20s C", I think it's a question of where you grew up - I know I'm in Adelaide if the temperature is in the 40s too long, in Perth if it's in the 30s for a while, in Melbourne if it's raining, in Hobart if it's cold and raining, in Brisbane if it's hot and raining, in Canberra if it's frigid (provided ANZAC day's passed - don't switch your heaters on until then, guys, remember?) and in Darwin if it's (exactly) 33C and storms (every day of the year).

2014-05-04 Reply Admin

None:
mortfurd:
That would be multiply by 9, divide by 5, add 32. It was done correctly for Manchester.
London appears to have been "calculated" as multiply by 3.13 , add 90.31

That's what I get from a linear regression, anyway.

It gives a new meaning to the expression "local weather" if your choice of algorithms is location-dependent.

Sometimes 113 102 and sometimes it's 97 (depending on rain). Looks like 7 can be 2 or 4 too......

2014-05-04 Reply Admin

loss of precisions:
None:
mortfurd:
That would be multiply by 9, divide by 5, add 32. It was done correctly for Manchester.
London appears to have been "calculated" as multiply by 3.13 , add 90.31

That's what I get from a linear regression, anyway.

It gives a new meaning to the expression "local weather" if your choice of algorithms is location-dependent.
Sometimes 113 102 and sometimes it's 97 (depending on rain). Looks like 7 can be 2 or 4 too......

That's minimums and maximums you twit!

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
But the point of that scale being usefull isn't the points where phase transitions occur for water, it's to give more meaning between the full increments. If you say the weather is going to be in the 20s Celsius, it doesn't mean nearly as much as saying that the weather will be in the 70s Fahrenheit.

Ignoring that you wouldn't normally say that the weather's going to be in the 20s, at worst you'd say high 20s or low 20s. 30s and above you could just say 30s/etc because anything above 30 is terrible... and in the other direction there aren't any good words for 10s/00s.

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

So, as for the Footlocker store in Italy, I'm pretty sure undefined is the only appropriate time you could put. When I traveled to Italy, it seems that storekeepers hours are sometime in the morning (if they wake up), and maybe sometime in the afternoon after a very long lunch.

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

Gerry:
Where I'm from the record high is 34.4C and low -0.6C, so 0 to 100 is normally OK. Living anywhere with regular sub-zero (BELOW FREEZING - are you nuts?) is TRWTF

Living somewhere where it freezes is nuts?

It gets sub-freezing ("sub-zero" to you Centigrade folk; we just call it "freezing" or "sub-freezing") every year in most of the US. Last year was a particularly cold one, and in the mid-US where I live there were several days when it actually got to what we call sub-zero - that's below 0°F, or -17.78°C for y'all. And if I mentioned that to the folks in Alaska and Minnesota, they would have a good laugh at our puny winters.

chubertdev · 2014-05-05 Reply Admin

Anone:
chubertdev:
But the point of that scale being usefull isn't the points where phase transitions occur for water, it's to give more meaning between the full increments. If you say the weather is going to be in the 20s Celsius, it doesn't mean nearly as much as saying that the weather will be in the 70s Fahrenheit.

Ignoring that you wouldn't normally say that the weather's going to be in the 20s, at worst you'd say high 20s or low 20s. 30s and above you could just say 30s/etc because anything above 30 is terrible... and in the other direction there aren't any good words for 10s/00s.

So you have to use additional wording to have the same precision? You're proving my point.

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

mortfurd:
Jay:
mortfurd:
That would be multiply by 9, divide by 5, add 32. It was done correctly for Manchester.
London appears to have been "calculated" as multiply by 3.13 , add 90.31

That's what I get from a linear regression, anyway.

Or they could have multiplied by 1 and added 106. Or multiplied by 42 and subtracted 181. With only one pair of numbers, there are an infinite number of formulas that would map one to the other.
Take a good look at the screen shots. You've got 4 pairs for London, and 3 for Manchester.

Ah, that didn't register on me. I'll do something now that you rarely see on this or any other forum: I concede that I was mistaken.

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

Some Damn Yank:
F:
Jay:
If Mr Brenner is dead, that might explain why he had to drop out of the race. Though that said, I don't know much about Afghan politics, but here in the U.S.:
(a) Dead people regularly vote. I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to run for office. There was just some story in the news that North Carolina had found that several hundred ballots had been cast in the last election in the name of dead people. They added, "most of them by absentee ballot". Which leads me to wonder: Which candidate did the people who mailed in their ballots from Hell vote for, as opposed to which candidate got the votes from the people in Heaven?

Never mind that. Which dead people voted in person? and why were they not noticed?
Just because you're a zombie doesn't mean you should lose your right to vote!

How could a zombie be allowed to vote? Their mindless automatons, incapable of rational thought.

Oh, wait, that doesn't really distinguish them from many other voters.

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

Friedrice The Great:
Dan:
Zombies don't vote. They're looking for brains.
Won't find them amongst Tea Party Repubs.

Of course you won't find zombies amongst Tea Party types. Because Tea Party types have guns and can defend themselves. I expect you'd mostly find zombies in "gun free" zones. Besides, they can blend in with Democrats more easily. :-)

2014-05-05 Reply Admin

Watson:
chubertdev:
I was always taught that it's 98.6 F for a human body, so I guess that it hasn't changed too much.
That's what you get if you convert 37°C (which is itself approximate because human bodies aren't that homogeneous) into Fahrenheit and fail to discard the spurious precision.

I've had many conversations with people where they'll say something like, "The distance was about 50 miles or so, and I think it took us, oh I guess maybe 70 minutes to get there. So our average speed was 42.857 miles per hour." I point out that performing a calculation on two numbers accurate to just 1 or maybe 2 digits cannot possibly give an answer accurate to more than 2 digits, and so the correct conclusion is, "our average speed was about 43 miles per hour". Then they say, "No, look, I did it on the calculator. See, right here, its says 42.857." I try to explain that only the first digit or two is meaningful. And they stare at me blankly and say, "But isn't it better to give a more precise answer?"

Indeed, you often hear this silliness from people who think they're being scientific. Like how many episodes of Star Trek have had the captain announce that they must travel to a destination 10 light years away, he says, "proceed at warp factor 5", and then Spock or Data takes these two one-digit precision numbers and gives an estimate of travel time precise to the millisecond?

Or they hear some broad, general description of a problem, like "we're going to have to travel right through the middle of that asteroid belt!", and with no further information about trajectories, time the trip will start, etc, they solemnly announce, "The probability of successfully traversing the asteroid belt is only 10.38974%". How could you possibly calculate to that level of precision that from the information given?

</rant>

chubertdev · 2014-05-05 Reply Admin

Jay:
Indeed, you often hear this silliness from people who think they're being scientific. Like how many episodes of Star Trek have had the captain announce that they must travel to a destination 10 light years away, he says, "proceed at warp factor 5", and then Spock or Data takes these two one-digit precision numbers and gives an estimate of travel time precise to the millisecond?

To be fair, the navigator or whomever will know that the destination is 10.234789342387402394023854097253 light years away, and will base the calculation off of that, while the captain is just rounding.

   string quote = String.Format("We must travel {0:d0} light years  away.", lightYears);

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

I know I'm late (long holidays this weekend) and nobody cares anymore but the London temperature issue seems to be due to doing it twice.

E.g. round(C_to_F(round(C_to_F( 7 )))) => 113 round(C_to_F(round(C_to_F( 2 )))) => 97 round(C_to_F(round(C_to_F( 4 )))) => 102 round(C_to_F(round(C_to_F( 8 )))) => 115

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.

If you're required to enter the title, then the gender will be automatically populated accordingly (if not already set by the user). The user of course reserves the right to override the "gender" setting, thereby allowing e.g. females to refer to themselves as "Mr." should they so desire.

TRWTF is websites requiring to know this information. Unless e.g. for healthcare matters or possible (and possibly spurious) gender differences for insurance purposes, most of the time it is no business of the application behind the website what the gender is of the person with whom they are interacting.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

mortfurd:
Take a good look at the screen shots. You've got 4 pairs for London, and 3 for Manchester.

I see 4 pairs for each.

Manchester:

1°C = 34°F 2°C = 36°F 6°C = 43°F 7°C = 45°F

London:

2°C = 36 = 97°F 4°C = 39 = 102°F 7°C = 45 = 113°F 8°C = 46 = 115°F

(Thanks to Your Name for London conversion formula.)

chubertdev · 2014-05-06 Reply Admin

QJo:
Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.

If you're required to enter the title, then the gender will be automatically populated accordingly (if not already set by the user). The user of course reserves the right to override the "gender" setting, thereby allowing e.g. females to refer to themselves as "Mr." should they so desire.

TRWTF is websites requiring to know this information. Unless e.g. for healthcare matters or possible (and possibly spurious) gender differences for insurance purposes, most of the time it is no business of the application behind the website what the gender is of the person with whom they are interacting.

Then you test to see if it will accept an option that you place in the drop down via editing the source.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

The "44-11-2015" date is probably a case of the programmer mixing up the formatting codes for months and minutes, which in most languages differ only by capitalization (e.g., "MM" and "mm", or "%m" and "%M"). Although 44 is obviously not within the range 01-12, it is within the range 00-59.

2014-05-06 Reply Admin

Also the real WTF is Celsius. What moron develops a system that puts 0 at the temperature that fresh water freezes at a few hundred feet above sea level.

it's very useful when you regularly have freezing weather to see that it's -5 VS +5, for example.

2014-05-08 Reply Admin

Watson:
Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.
Except that gender is optional and all the options for title are gender-specific.
"We aren't going to require you to tell us your gender; we have other ways of obtaining that information."

Room for future expansion in case they start dealing with doctors, or military personnel, or religious leaders, government ministers, and a load of others I can't be arsed to think of :-)

2014-05-08 Reply Admin

Neil:
mortfurd:
Take a good look at the screen shots. You've got 4 pairs for London, and 3 for Manchester.
I see 4 pairs for each.
Manchester:

1°C = 34°F 2°C = 36°F 6°C = 43°F 7°C = 45°F

London:

2°C = 36 = 97°F 4°C = 39 = 102°F 7°C = 45 = 113°F 8°C = 46 = 115°F

(Thanks to Your Name for London conversion formula.)

I've actually got 4 pairs for London, and 5 for Manchester. You seem to have missed the main 5°C = 41°F. ;-)

Also, a very big thanks to "Your Name" from me too... An affine transformation that linked the values for London was provably impossible, even with rounding, since the linear coefficient would've needed to be both less than 3 (based on 2:97 :: 4:102, or on 7:113 :: 8:115) and greater than 3.33 (based on 4:102 :: 7:113)...

2014-05-09 Reply Admin

Iamaman:
Watson:
Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.
Except that gender is optional and all the options for title are gender-specific.
"We aren't going to require you to tell us your gender; we have other ways of obtaining that information."
Room for future expansion in case they start dealing with doctors, or military personnel, or religious leaders, government ministers, and a load of others I can't be arsed to think of :-)

That reminds me of someone answering a questionnaire in school. They had to write a parent's anme, and mark a multiple choice answer with entries like "Mr.", "Mrs.", "Mr. and Mrs.", and "Dr. and Mrs." He asked how to answer "Dr. and Mr." when the questionnaire didn't have a choice for it. I don't remember if it had a choice for "Miss". ("Ms." either hadn't been invented yet or didn't suit the school district's administrators, not that it mattered when her title was "Dr." and she had a husband.)

2014-05-12 Reply Admin

R. Daneel Olivaw:
Iamaman:
Watson:
Ian Tester:
Ben's screenshot is just fine. It looks like he's selected the 'title' drop-down, not 'gender'. And it's mandatory. Not a WTF at all.
Except that gender is optional and all the options for title are gender-specific.
"We aren't going to require you to tell us your gender; we have other ways of obtaining that information."
Room for future expansion in case they start dealing with doctors, or military personnel, or religious leaders, government ministers, and a load of others I can't be arsed to think of :-)
That reminds me of someone answering a questionnaire in school. They had to write a parent's anme, and mark a multiple choice answer with entries like "Mr.", "Mrs.", "Mr. and Mrs.", and "Dr. and Mrs." He asked how to answer "Dr. and Mr." when the questionnaire didn't have a choice for it. I don't remember if it had a choice for "Miss". ("Ms." either hadn't been invented yet or didn't suit the school district's administrators, not that it mattered when her title was "Dr." and she had a husband.)

Unless she had a doctorate in parenting, I don't see why her title is relevant at all when she's corresponding with her kids' school.

ShachMaT · 2014-05-13 Reply Admin

Klimax:
Warren:
Of course you want the older version, e.g. Windows 7 vs 8 Office 2003 vs 2007

Nope.

YES.

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