The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Wait, so your argument is that because you don't need to know precise numbers, that the Fahrenheit system is better for day to day use?

Following that logic, wouldn't the best system for day to day use be "Hot, Cold" and some modifiers such as "Really" and "Extremely"?

Do you know what else comes really close to capturing the temperatures we experience? Literally any scale that can be used to measure it.

chubertdev · 2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Ben:
Wait, so your argument is that because you don't need to know precise numbers, that the Fahrenheit system is better for day to day use?
Following that logic, wouldn't the best system for day to day use be "Hot, Cold" and some modifiers such as "Really" and "Extremely"?

Do you know what else comes really close to capturing the temperatures we experience? Literally any scale that can be used to measure it.

"Today's high will be Don't Stick Your Hand In That Toaster."

Coyne · 2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Ben:
Wait, so your argument is that because you don't need to know precise numbers, that the Fahrenheit system is better for day to day use?
Following that logic, wouldn't the best system for day to day use be "Hot, Cold" and some modifiers such as "Really" and "Extremely"?

Do you know what else comes really close to capturing the temperatures we experience? Literally any scale that can be used to measure it.

Neither system is really convenient, when you come right down to it (though I like the idea behind the quote above about 0 F being too cold and 100 F too hot)

I vote for a system where 00 is freezing and 10 is boiling, and room temperature is around 00.0111. Don't we all agree that would be much more convenient?

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Coyne:
Ben:
Wait, so your argument is that because you don't need to know precise numbers, that the Fahrenheit system is better for day to day use?
Following that logic, wouldn't the best system for day to day use be "Hot, Cold" and some modifiers such as "Really" and "Extremely"?

Do you know what else comes really close to capturing the temperatures we experience? Literally any scale that can be used to measure it.

Neither system is really convenient, when you come right down to it (though I like the idea behind the quote above about 0 F being too cold and 100 F too hot)

I vote for a system where 00 is freezing and 10 is boiling, and room temperature is around 00.0111. Don't we all agree that would be much more convenient?

Freezing? Boiling? Of hydrogen?

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Supposedly a design goal of the Fahrenheit was that temperatures below 0 would be unusual (avoiding those "tricky" negative numbers), and that for "usual" temperatures you wouldn't need to use decimals to get enough precision. Hence 0-100 represent roughly the range of temperatures you get in Europe. The precise values were chosen so that the resulting thermometers would be easy to make and calibrate; 0 and 32 are easy to get reference points for, and making 32 even divisions is easy to do.

Celsius isn't really a sensible unit; for real scientific work you'd want degrees Kelvin, and for everyday use it requires you to use fractional degrees.

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

operagost:
First of all, you don't turn up the heat on a hot-water system by directly manipulating the radiator.

Um, in my first long-term apartment, you did.

That was our control over our heat.

Ben:
Wait, so your argument is that because you don't need to know precise numbers, that the Fahrenheit system is better for day to day use?
Following that logic, wouldn't the best system for day to day use be "Hot, Cold" and some modifiers such as "Really" and "Extremely"?

Um, that wasn't my argument at all. My argument was that the specific numbers the Celsius scale is anchored at -- the melting and boiling point of water -- are not important. Using "very hot" is a problem because it would either not be an absolute scale ("very hot" to me is quite different from "very hot" to someone who lives in Florida) or it would overload the terms like "hot" (more and in more confusing ways than they already are).

Do you know what else comes really close to capturing the temperatures we experience? Literally any scale that can be used to measure it.

Coyne's response is best. 0-100 is more convenient than -15 to 40 for similar reasons to why "0.011 is room temperature" is less convenient.

jt:
Celsius isn't really a sensible unit; for real scientific work you'd want degrees Kelvin, and for everyday use it requires you to use fractional degrees.

Eh, I disagree on that last one. 1 deg C is about 2 deg F.

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Evan:
jt:
Celsius isn't really a sensible unit; for real scientific work you'd want degrees Kelvin, and for everyday use it requires you to use fractional degrees.
Eh, I disagree on that last one. 1 deg C is about 2 deg F.

Ooops, I forgot to finish my thought. How often in everyday use do you have to care about the difference between, say, 70 and 71 degrees? I'm not even sure I'd be able to feel the difference (though sometimes I think I would). I don't think "everyday use" for most people requires the resolution that Fahrenheit provides.

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Evan:
Evan:
jt:
Celsius isn't really a sensible unit; for real scientific work you'd want degrees Kelvin, and for everyday use it requires you to use fractional degrees.
Eh, I disagree on that last one. 1 deg C is about 2 deg F.
Ooops, I forgot to finish my thought. How often in everyday use do you have to care about the difference between, say, 70 and 71 degrees? I'm not even sure I'd be able to feel the difference (though sometimes I think I would). I don't think "everyday use" for most people requires the resolution that Fahrenheit provides.

I know I can tell the difference between 72 and 74 degrees. 72 being the sweet spot for office temperature and 74 being too damn hot.

2013-02-05 Reply Admin

Coyne:
I vote for a system where 00 is freezing and 10 is boiling, and room temperature is around 00.0111. Don't we all agree that would be much more convenient?

That would work in decigrade. Remember that Celsius used to be called centigrade. Freezing is still 0. Boiling is 10 instead of 100. Room temperature in our kitchen when Vista died is 0.0111 instead of 0.111. It works.

(We kept Vista in a bowl on the kitchen table. Vista came from the tropics and failed to adjust to Japanese winters. Vista got her name because I was installing another betta in a PC when we got her.)

Scarlet Manuka · 2013-02-05 Reply Admin

operagost:
Second, your system will crash way before it hits 230 degrees F. I don't know of any CPUs that will survive exceeding the boiling point of water.

My PC started having trouble booting up a month or two back. I went into the BIOS setup to check the CPU temperature (yes, TRWTF is that that's the only place I can see it) and found it was 104 degrees C. Vacuumed all the dust off the CPU fan and elsewhere, rebooted and watched the CPU temperature drop to 35 degrees C. No problems since.

F***-it Fred:
And then the poor bastard discovered that his overheated CPU had calculated everything wrong and rendered all that work useless.

I thought something similar to this also. But really there are two options: (i) He realises that the previous results were likely to be affected by the CPU overheating and recalculates them later in the week. Noboy actually needed the data before then anyway and all is well. (ii) It doesn't occur to him that the calculations should be redone. Everyone accepts the results because they don't know what they were supposed to be (that's why they wanted to do the calculations). The resulting errors eventually show up as limitations of certain medical techniques, but nobody ever realises where the problem really lies.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

jt:
Supposedly a design goal of the Fahrenheit was that temperatures below 0 would be unusual (avoiding those "tricky" negative numbers), and that for "usual" temperatures you wouldn't need to use decimals to get enough precision. Hence 0-100 represent roughly the range of temperatures you get in Europe. The precise values were chosen so that the resulting thermometers would be easy to make and calibrate; 0 and 32 are easy to get reference points for, and making 32 even divisions is easy to do.
Celsius isn't really a sensible unit; for real scientific work you'd want degrees Kelvin, and for everyday use it requires you to use fractional degrees.

That isn't what I always heard. 100 degrees was supposed to be human body temperature. Somehow that got screwed up. I don't know if that was bad measurement initially or with copying the work later. 0 degrees was supposed to be as cold as it ever got - determined by sending a ship as far north from England as it could get and returning with the resulting measurement. So 32 is an accident, as is the size of the steps.

Let me go check Wikipedia to see which of us is correct. If it is you, I will change the article. Wither way, I will continue on my merry way knowing that people who check it out after I do will agree with me.

DaveK · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

jay:
RichP:
Tim:
Bad Human:
Maybe she died.
that was my best guess
People, come on, have some decency here!
This is the intertubes, the correct question is: "did she died?"

I think you mean, "Am she bees done deaded?"

ITYM, "She an heroed".

hikari · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

operagost:
First of all, you don't turn up the heat on a hot-water system by directly manipulating the radiator. Second, your system will crash way before it hits 230 degrees F. I don't know of any CPUs that will survive exceeding the boiling point of water.

You sort of do; at least here (UK) radiators have a valve on them which lets you control the flow of hot water to them. The actual temperature of the water is controlled by the boiler, of course.

Soviut · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Paul:
Soviut:
Also, I'm fairly certain they mean "president of the funding committee" not "president of the united states".
There's a difference?
I thought if we could only get our heads together long enough to elect the right person, he/she would just hand out limitless gobs of cash to everybody and we would all be rich. It is only a few stupid but powerful angry people -- racists, too -- who stand in the way, spoiling it for all of us.

You're right, southern america needs to go!

Soviut · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

WhiskeyJack:
I've had similar experiences at work, as have probably most people.
One time I was working on a new feature just before Canada Day (think Fourth of July, you Americans). And just before I was going on vacation. I was told that my boss wanted to demo this the week after to a potential customer in Japan, and it had to be done. Period.

OK, so I put in all kinds of overtime that week, including working the whole day on Canada Day. Delayed my vacation by a day too. Got it done. Sent off the code along with instructions on how to install and run it on the laptop they were taking with them to Japan. Then took off for a well-deserved rest.

When I got back, I asked how the demo went, and if the customer was impressed with the new feature. "Oh, that? We didn't have time to show them."

And you said, "I worked overtime, delayed my vacation and worked my ass off to get it done, why didn't you do your part, asshole?", right?

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

restarted the VM

Is he running java in virtual machine?

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

That has to be the most boring thing I've ever read on this increasingly boring website. Why do we have to have the stories embellished like a Mills and fuc|<ing Boon novel?

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Soviut:
WhiskeyJack:
I've had similar experiences at work, as have probably most people.
One time I was working on a new feature just before Canada Day (think Fourth of July, you Americans). And just before I was going on vacation. I was told that my boss wanted to demo this the week after to a potential customer in Japan, and it had to be done. Period.

OK, so I put in all kinds of overtime that week, including working the whole day on Canada Day. Delayed my vacation by a day too. Got it done. Sent off the code along with instructions on how to install and run it on the laptop they were taking with them to Japan. Then took off for a well-deserved rest.

When I got back, I asked how the demo went, and if the customer was impressed with the new feature. "Oh, that? We didn't have time to show them."

And you said, "I worked overtime, delayed my vacation and worked my ass off to get it done, why didn't you do your part, asshole?", right?

Can be frustrating, but I've been in similar situations, and it is often the case that the (potential) customer (who drives the agenda of this stuff) has completely forgotten the suggestion he made at last meeting ("Those buttons look boring, can you make them into little animated can-can dancers? Oh, and we want it to play the intro to the movie Die Hard 2, but you'll have to fix it so that you don't violate any copyrights ...") and instead says, "Hey, I've got a great idea, how about if you ..." and expresses no interest in what's been done from last meeting.

This is exceptionally a problem when there are multiple stakeholders, none of whom turn up to all of these pre-sales meetings, and so none of them know the whole story. Not only that, but all of them have a different list of priorities - so it's frequently the case that the work you did to satisfy Stakeholder 1 (who happens to be louder than wise) is irrelevant to Stakeholder 2 (who actually has a better idea of what is really needed).

Add to the mix the fact that in many of the larger organisations have a metaphorical revolving door at the top, and so the stakeholder who required all these changes is no longer employed by the time the next pre-sales demo takes place.

Sympathies, though - more than one colleague of mine has resigned his position as a result of too much of this sort of thing happening. Saying "(shrug) it happens" doesn't actually help in such circumstances.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Not so easy. First you must convert litres to liters.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Aah, sunlight... Once upon a time I worked for an IT Company in Norway, delivering a lot of computers to the county. And a few days later, we start getting calls. In the morning, all computers on one side of the building started to behave funny, in the afternoon it was the other side of the building. The error was described as windows (3.11) going bananas, mouse pointer going all over the screen.

After many long days, a lot of screaming from our bosses and the customer, we found the error. The computers mouse has a production error, causing a gap in the chassis of the mouse. Sunlight shining into the mouse causing the optical sensors to go bananas...

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

TRWTF is his response in the first place.

First, when given a midnight deadline, you NEVER say "Midnight? You'll have it by 5pm my good sir!" Deliver 7 hours early and you're a hero. Promise you'll deliver 7 hours early and you're just stressing yourself for no good reason.

Second, the correct response is "The research notes are due tonight? Wow, that sucks for you. You'll have to tell me how it went when I feel better."

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

DD:
Not so easy. First you must convert litres to liters.

To what?

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

I was reading at first, Andrew choke his chicken.

Steve The Cynic · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

F:
DD:
Not so easy. First you must convert litres to liters.

To what?

Lighters, duh. Can't you read? Think: light is sometimes written as lite (see e.g. non-British European cans of Diet Coke, called Coca-Cola Lite), so lighter should be writeable as liter.

Alternatively, a liter is an American litre. The American cubic centimeter is about 5% larger than the European cubic centimetre, but they have 20% less of them in a liter than we do of ours in a litre, so the litre is 21% bigger than the liter.

I should probably stop now...

Steve The Cynic · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

IV:
That isn't what I always heard. 100 degrees was supposed to be human body temperature. Somehow that got screwed up. I don't know if that was bad measurement initially or with copying the work later. 0 degrees was supposed to be as cold as it ever got - determined by sending a ship as far north from England as it could get and returning with the resulting measurement. So 32 is an accident, as is the size of the steps.
Let me go check Wikipedia to see which of us is correct. If it is you, I will change the article. Wither way, I will continue on my merry way knowing that people who check it out after I do will agree with me.

I did check Wikip. The truthy is that neither of you is right.

The Fahrenheit scale is the product of the possibly-fevered imagination of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, with some refinements later on to make it easier to use. DGF based the scale on a particular sort of "brine" (actually based on ammonium chloride, not sodium chloride) that melts at about what is now called 0 °F; normal water, which melts at what he pinned as 32 °F; and "blood heat" (body temperature) at 96 °F. The scale was later tweaked so that water boils (at pressures of 100 kilopascals) at 212 °F, which is why normal body temperature is just over 98 °F on the modern scale.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Alternatively, a liter is an American litre. The American cubic centimeter is about 5% larger than the European cubic centimetre, but they have 20% less of them in a liter than we do of ours in a litre, so the litre is 21% bigger than the liter..

In other words, the litre is an Imperial liter.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

B00nbuster:
TRWTF is that he didn't immediatelly recognize that the crash was due to overheating.
If my PC keeps crashing (and it must have rebooted, because that's the symptom of overheating!) under CPU load this would be my first suspect! I have yet to see a JVM that causes a rebooting crash. Bluescreen at most. But a rebooting crash??!

TRWTF is that the poor ill guy was just inexperienced.

Pretty sure that modern versions of Windows do not, by default, ever give a BSOD -- they just reboot (I know this is true of XP, though they may have gone back since.) So unless he'd gone digging through the system settings to change that, it's likely the two would have been indistinguishable.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

I've got it, the President was actually a woman! Right?

operagost · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
operagost:
Second, your system will crash way before it hits 230 degrees F. I don't know of any CPUs that will survive exceeding the boiling point of water.
I don't know of any CPUs that depend on water. Some cooling systems put heat sinks in water instead of air but the CPU doesn't know that. Most cooling systems use air. The CPU works fine when hotter than the boiling points of nitrogen, oxygen, etc.

It's not that there was water to be boiled, but every PC I've used either malfunctioned or, if equipped, automatically shut down at temps between 70 and 80 degrees C, which is about 176 F. The "boiling water" reference is mostly for impact. What I HAVE found is improperly calibrated motherboard sensors that read as much as 30 degrees off (Celsius), which could have been the problem.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

"Andrew," Steinbrenner said, "remember what I said about the president’s sick daughter?"

"Of course I do. I'm the one that gave her it. If she shaves it they'll leave."

Ba-dum-tss.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

danixdefcon5:
jay:
It must be very confusing living in Europe. If you want to get a feel for even a simple thing like whether your car gets good fuel economy, you have to convert liters to gallons, then you have to convert kilometers to miles, and finally you have to convert Euros to real money. :-)
hehehe. Its actually easier to deal with ºC and kms, especially as you don't need to memorize uneven multipliers. Everything's metric!

On the serious side: When I was in high school and college and was studying physics and chemistry, the advantages of metric were obvious, and I couldn't comprehend why the U.S. didn't make the switch. But when I graduated and became an IT geek, I didn't have much need to do a lot of arithmetic with units of measurement, and it just didn't matter to me any more. When I look up how far it is to my friend's house, whether I get that number in miles or kilometers doesn't matter much. Given that, I can see how switching from units that you are familiar with for no clear advantage just seems like too much trouble for most people.

The biggest hassle I run into with English measurements these days is when I'm trying to follow the instructions on the back of a box of food. How many tablespoons in a cup again? Etc.

2013-02-06 Reply Admin

OH, I have had systems that went well above 80° Celsius. Maybe they even reached 100°, I don't know, they were stable anyway. I looked quite infrequently on the temperature reading.

Arancaytar · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

Andrew:
Worst punchline ever.
So let me get this straight: a computer doing science had an overheating problem from being next to a heat source, so it was moved to a cold windowsill. All the while, the user was being nagged to get said science done. For all we know, it got done on time.

Not a WTF.

At least he's still alive, and I'm betting his data points made a beautiful line.

russ0519 · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

ohansen:
Aah, sunlight... Once upon a time I worked for an IT Company in Norway, delivering a lot of computers to the county. And a few days later, we start getting calls. In the morning, all computers on one side of the building started to behave funny, in the afternoon it was the other side of the building. The error was described as windows (3.11) going bananas, mouse pointer going all over the screen.
After many long days, a lot of screaming from our bosses and the customer, we found the error. The computers mouse has a production error, causing a gap in the chassis of the mouse. Sunlight shining into the mouse causing the optical sensors to go bananas...

I don't buy it. Optical mice in time of windows 3.1?

Coyne · 2013-02-06 Reply Admin

ohansen:
Aah, sunlight... Once upon a time I worked for an IT Company in Norway, delivering a lot of computers to the county. And a few days later, we start getting calls. In the morning, all computers on one side of the building started to behave funny, in the afternoon it was the other side of the building. The error was described as windows (3.11) going bananas, mouse pointer going all over the screen.
After many long days, a lot of screaming from our bosses and the customer, we found the error. The computers mouse has a production error, causing a gap in the chassis of the mouse. Sunlight shining into the mouse causing the optical sensors to go bananas...

About 5 years ago, there were some elevators at a local parking garage that would go offline at certain times of day. Who knew elevators used optical systems that could be affected by sunlight?

2013-02-07 Reply Admin

russ0519:
I don't buy it. Optical mice in time of windows 3.1?

The client was the county. This was last year.

2013-02-07 Reply Admin

It was probably Friday when they gave him the rest of the week off anyway...

2013-02-07 Reply Admin

operagost:
It's not that there was water to be boiled, but every PC I've used either malfunctioned or, if equipped, automatically shut down at temps between 70 and 80 degrees C, which is about 176 F.

That's what made me wonder when exactly this alleged story could have happened. Andrew runs the software on his "desktop PC" at home.

The last "desktop PC" processor that didn't have thermal protection of any sort was the Athlon K7 (the XP already had a sensor, but could still be fried if the board didn't properly support it). All later ones indeed shut down when overheating, most even throttle themselves to run cooler and avoid the hard shut down if possible. The actual temperature is CPU and sometimes BIOS dependent, but yes - 110C is beyond the usual.

And most of the time the system works fine until it has to shutdown (a bit slower perhaps). But if there's misbehaviour, it's usually totally obvious - random processes terminating with privilege violations. The real WTF would indeed be not noticing that.

2013-02-07 Reply Admin

russ0519:
ohansen:
Sunlight shining into the mouse causing the optical sensors to go bananas...

I don't buy it. Optical mice in time of windows 3.1?

He didn't say "optical mice". He said "optical sensor". If you're too young to remember how a mechanical mouse works, look at the subheading "Mechanical mice" on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29

zelmak · 2013-02-08 Reply Admin

Svensson:
russ0519:
ohansen:
Sunlight shining into the mouse causing the optical sensors to go bananas...

I don't buy it. Optical mice in time of windows 3.1?

He didn't say "optical mice". He said "optical sensor". If you're too young to remember how a mechanical mouse works, look at the subheading "Mechanical mice" on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29

Or, even, look into Sun Microsystems/Mouse Systems optical mice (with required metal grid pad) in the early 1990s. (Goodness, these things were awful.)

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

2013-02-13 Reply Admin

Way back when I had a 486 computer that I was learning 3d CAD on. My dad bought a match coprocessor for it but all they had was a 386 one that badly overheated any time it was used heavily. The solution was drop a racing lug nut on top of the mat coprocessor...

2013-02-15 Reply Admin

He was not questioning if she died, but was telling that he thought she died. the real question is, what is WTF mean?

2013-03-04 Reply Admin

TRWTF is this story itself. If the problem was overheating, wouldn't it ALSO crash on the 1st two calculations? Not just the 3rd. Did the PC fall out the window? What about the daughter?

2013-04-24 Reply Admin

3 DNA sequences: President, president's wife, and sick daughter.

Apparently, the sick daughter is not the president's.

2013-09-11 Reply Admin

there are nvidia gtx480 versions running stable at 107°C

2013-12-12 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
The Fahrenheit scale is the product of the possibly-fevered imagination of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, with some refinements later on to make it easier to use. DGF based the scale on a particular sort of "brine" (actually based on ammonium chloride, not sodium chloride) that melts at about what is now called 0 °F; normal water, which melts at what he pinned as 32 °F; and "blood heat" (body temperature) at 96 °F. The scale was later tweaked so that water boils (at pressures of 100 kilopascals) at 212 °F, which is why normal body temperature is just over 98 °F on the modern scale.

Boom! Practical.

2017-11-19 Reply Admin

oh, so this is the story that started that "then the president's daughter spread a disease that killed everyone" sillyness.

2017-11-19 Reply Admin

"All eyes turned on the president's daughter just as she threw up, Within a half hour, everyone in the Admiral's office was dead from a highly virulent disease previously unseen in human history."

2021-01-24 Reply Admin

Instantly thought: "Does he imply the Coronavirus??" ...until I saw the post's date...

Human Heat Sink

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