The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

PedanticCurmudgeon · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Ozz:
da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.
Is that why she can't say no? Because she's a hexed wench?

We could at this point ask if there's any other kind, but that would be too easy, so we won't.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

Coyne · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

I don't know what Sam Oldak is complaining about. After all, both icons close the current window (even though one does a bit more than that).

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Go Powerbuilder!

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Cbuttius:
You said:nej Anna said:It's great that you're so linguistically impressive, but please talk to me in English.

Du sa:nej Anna sa:Det var tråkigt att höra.

("It was sad to hear.")

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

i went to ikeas website once atfter reading the article and i talked to ana and she didnt seem helpful even for the store s website itself . she didnt realy provide me any useful inforation on ikea product nor she couldnt help me find where i needed to go on teh website about whatever productl ine i asked her. when she responded by asking if she was helpful and i said no firefox crashed and i was like "WTF"

DaveK · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

Chico (DOH!):
da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

HONK!

P.S: It was Groucho, not Chico, who said that to the steward.

da Doctah · 2012-08-31 Reply Admin

DaveK:
Chico (DOH!):
da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

HONK!
P.S: It was Groucho, not Chico, who said that to the steward.

But it was Chico who said it to Groucho.

For years I've wanted to know more about the girl in that scene who comes in looking for her aunt Minnie.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

If you look really close at the two arrows in the first picture, they're pointing in different directions. The one on the left points down, to indicate the current window, and the one on the right points right to indicate that it functions to close the application. Not a wtf, just a need for glasses.

2012-08-31 Reply Admin

I looked really close. No they don't. They both point left.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Colin Cameron's submission is not really a fail, but a trick. A gullible customer would decide to buy 3 of those separately "reasoning" that he is saving 1 pound in the process.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Someone:
If you look really close at the two arrows in the first picture, they're pointing in different directions. The one on the left points down, to indicate the current window, and the one on the right points right to indicate that it functions to close the application. Not a wtf, just a need for glasses.

have you left yours off?

Watson · 2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Ralph:
What the hell gives Microsoft the idea that they can dictate to you when you will log off and the computer will shut down? Whose computer is it anyway?

The computer may be yours, but the operating system isn't.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

Irish Girl > Anna, but I'm not sure if she understands 'no' either.

Maurits · 2012-09-01 Reply Admin

From a command prompt:

shutdown /s /t 314359980

Sometime in the next ten years or so:

shutdown /a

Crisis averted.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

18446744073709600000 documents remaining? If every document was 1 bit large, that'd make it 2305843009213700000 bytes. Which is 2251799813685253 kilobytes, which is 2199023255552 megabytes. It's actually 2097152 terabytes.

So since the program didn't warn that all these documents weren't going to fit on his hard drive, so that's a bug. I get it now.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
Ralph:
What the hell gives Microsoft the idea that they can dictate to you when you will log off and the computer will shut down? Whose computer is it anyway?
I used to work making short digital movies. I'd kick off a job before going home in the evening. They'd render all night and in the morning I'd see what I got -- unless Microsoft capriciously decided in the middle of the night, with my CPU load running at 100%, that I wasn't doing anything important so it would just kill my work. It wasn't as if I could resume half way through. I'd have to start over from the beginning. So basically a day's work lost every time they did this.

Jerks. I'd like the ability to forcefully take a day's worth of Microsoft's revenue. Just to see how they like being treated the way they treat their customers.
Umm...

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change When The Computer Sleeps

(Win 7)

Or it could be the updater

DaveK · 2012-09-01 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
DaveK:
Chico (DOH!):
da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

HONK!
P.S: It was Groucho, not Chico, who said that to the steward.

But it was Chico who said it to Groucho.
For years I've wanted to know more about the girl in that scene who comes in looking for her aunt Minnie.

I always assumed she must be someone's girlfriend / protegé / aspiring starlet being given a cameo, but don't know whether I came up with that idea solely based on my own guesswork or whether it was something I actually read or heard somewhere.

Wikipedia suggests it is a reference to the brothers' mother, Minnie Marx, who was their agent and driving force behind them getting started in showbiz. I certainly didn't know that before.

Of course, it is still possible that both of these suggestions are true. Or neither.

2012-09-01 Reply Admin

operagost:
QJo:
Herr Otto Flick:
Kwpolska:
What weird language doesn’t implement gettext or something like that? Seriously, that is much, much easier than PLAYING_WITH_UNDERSCORES_AND_STUFF.

I think they are using gettext, and USING_KEYS_INSTEAD_OF_ENGLISH as the msgids. The benefit of this is that it is clear WHEN_YOUVE_MISSED_A_TRANSLATION. The downside is that you have to provide an English translation, and any missing translations don't gracefully degrade to English.

Should be straightforward enough to write a wrapper that replaces all underscores with spaces and lowercases it all except for the first letter, and perhaps adds a full stop (period to USians) at the end.
What's a USian?

Pretty sure he means a Yankee, since we always have to explain to Yankees what sweet tea is, and how you have to put something up and not put it away, and how it's pop not "soda" and such forth. But I always thought a full stop was what you did at a stop sign so as the police wouldn't write you up a ticket.

da Doctah · 2012-09-02 Reply Admin

DaveK:
da Doctah:
For years I've wanted to know more about the girl in that scene who comes in looking for her aunt Minnie.
I always assumed she must be someone's girlfriend / protegé / aspiring starlet being given a cameo, but don't know whether I came up with that idea solely based on my own guesswork or whether it was something I actually read or heard somewhere.
Wikipedia suggests it is a reference to the brothers' mother, Minnie Marx, who was their agent and driving force behind them getting started in showbiz. I certainly didn't know that before.

Of course, it is still possible that both of these suggestions are true. Or neither.

The second suggestion is certainly likely; the boys' mother was named Minnie and she was a big influence on their career path. (Her brother, Al Shean, was half of the very popular 1920s comedy team of Gallagher and Shean.) There's little or no controversy about the source of the name.

The girl, on the other hand, is adorable, and I'm surprised nobody seems to know where she ended up. Irish girl's got nothing on her.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

me:
Ah, I recognise the Power Builder toolbar

Poor you. I have on occasion had to do PB stuff, and its most impressive feature appears to be its ability to hide code in totally unrelated places, and then die (with no error message) when you search for a term that would guarantee you find it....

That said, I don't recognise that toolbar, but I am using a fairly ancient PB - and I just found a picture of the doorway and clicked it and it closed ok - with a message suggesting it wasn't a graceful close....

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
Ralph:
What the hell gives Microsoft the idea that they can dictate to you when you will log off and the computer will shut down? Whose computer is it anyway?
I used to work making short digital movies. I'd kick off a job before going home in the evening. They'd render all night and in the morning I'd see what I got -- unless Microsoft capriciously decided in the middle of the night, with my CPU load running at 100%, that I wasn't doing anything important so it would just kill my work. It wasn't as if I could resume half way through. I'd have to start over from the beginning. So basically a day's work lost every time they did this.

Jerks. I'd like the ability to forcefully take a day's worth of Microsoft's revenue. Just to see how they like being treated the way they treat their customers.
Umm...

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change When The Computer Sleeps

(Win 7)

I don't think he's talking about sleep - I think he's talking when MS decides to give your system a new Service Pack or some minor upgrade that improves the presentation of rtext written in Underwater Hungarian, requiring a restart of the System - so you wake up in the morning only to find that the task you were working on has disappeared from the screen....

I don't understand why so many updates need a full reboot - and MS thinks it's important enough to do the reboot itself without asking the user whether it's ok....

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

Chico (DOH!):
da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

make that three hard-boiled eggs, and one duck egg.

Either that's 15 more hard boiled eggs, or it's foggy out....

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

asdfasdfasdfasdf:
i went to ikeas website once atfter reading the article and i talked to ana and she didnt seem helpful even for the store s website itself . she didnt realy provide me any useful inforation on ikea product nor she couldnt help me find where i needed to go on teh website about whatever productl ine i asked her. when she responded by asking if she was helpful and i said no firefox crashed and i was like "WTF"

Interesting - my impression was that IKEA always claimed price was more important tyhan service (I remember our local store having signs equivalent to "Our sales staff won't help you so you save money" - I suppose strange that this would extend to their website, but I guess actually getting someone to program a bot that understands would cost more money, and might impact the bottom line.

That said, perhaps Anna should be in sales - I've met a lot of salesmen who don't understand the word no

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

Bobby-John Thibodaux:
operagost:
QJo:
Herr Otto Flick:
Kwpolska:
What weird language doesn’t implement gettext or something like that? Seriously, that is much, much easier than PLAYING_WITH_UNDERSCORES_AND_STUFF.

I think they are using gettext, and USING_KEYS_INSTEAD_OF_ENGLISH as the msgids. The benefit of this is that it is clear WHEN_YOUVE_MISSED_A_TRANSLATION. The downside is that you have to provide an English translation, and any missing translations don't gracefully degrade to English.

Should be straightforward enough to write a wrapper that replaces all underscores with spaces and lowercases it all except for the first letter, and perhaps adds a full stop (period to USians) at the end.
What's a USian?

Pretty sure he means a Yankee, since we always have to explain to Yankees what sweet tea is, and how you have to put something up and not put it away, and how it's pop not "soda" and such forth. But I always thought a full stop was what you did at a stop sign so as the police wouldn't write you up a ticket.

Putting something up is somewhat different to putting something away - putting something up might get you accused of rape, while putting it away should avert the situation. Pop is music and soda is a (fairly bland) soft drink (Essentially carbonated water, I think)...

I have never heard of sweet tea before, but that's probably because Aussie's aren't quite the pansies that the Poms are....

QJo · 2012-09-03 Reply Admin

Chico (DOH!):
da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

... and 2 hard-boiled eggs.

... And one small aubergine.

QJo · 2012-09-03 Reply Admin

Bobby-John Thibodaux:
operagost:
QJo:
Herr Otto Flick:
Kwpolska:
What weird language doesn’t implement gettext or something like that? Seriously, that is much, much easier than PLAYING_WITH_UNDERSCORES_AND_STUFF.

I think they are using gettext, and USING_KEYS_INSTEAD_OF_ENGLISH as the msgids. The benefit of this is that it is clear WHEN_YOUVE_MISSED_A_TRANSLATION. The downside is that you have to provide an English translation, and any missing translations don't gracefully degrade to English.

Should be straightforward enough to write a wrapper that replaces all underscores with spaces and lowercases it all except for the first letter, and perhaps adds a full stop (period to USians) at the end.
What's a USian?

Pretty sure he means a Yankee, since we always have to explain to Yankees what sweet tea is, and how you have to put something up and not put it away, and how it's pop not "soda" and such forth. But I always thought a full stop was what you did at a stop sign so as the police wouldn't write you up a ticket.

I used the term "USian" to mean an inhabitant of the United States (of America). Having been taken to task for using the term "American" as, apparently, this adjective applies to every inhabitant of the North and South American continents (and some of these understand that a "full stop" is, in this context, a punctuation mark, and "period" is what the majority of women get every month). I have also been led to understand that USA is incorrect usage, despite the fact that the nation itself is (from what I remember from my possibly-inadequate education) the "United States of America". Can somebody explain to me precisely how the nation, and its inhabitants, are correctly to be appellated?

QJo · 2012-09-03 Reply Admin

Aussie:
Bobby-John Thibodaux:
operagost:
QJo:
Herr Otto Flick:
Kwpolska:
What weird language doesn’t implement gettext or something like that? Seriously, that is much, much easier than PLAYING_WITH_UNDERSCORES_AND_STUFF.

I think they are using gettext, and USING_KEYS_INSTEAD_OF_ENGLISH as the msgids. The benefit of this is that it is clear WHEN_YOUVE_MISSED_A_TRANSLATION. The downside is that you have to provide an English translation, and any missing translations don't gracefully degrade to English.

Should be straightforward enough to write a wrapper that replaces all underscores with spaces and lowercases it all except for the first letter, and perhaps adds a full stop (period to USians) at the end.
What's a USian?

Pretty sure he means a Yankee, since we always have to explain to Yankees what sweet tea is, and how you have to put something up and not put it away, and how it's pop not "soda" and such forth. But I always thought a full stop was what you did at a stop sign so as the police wouldn't write you up a ticket.
Putting something up is somewhat different to putting something away - putting something up might get you accused of rape, while putting it away should avert the situation. Pop is music and soda is a (fairly bland) soft drink (Essentially carbonated water, I think)...

I have never heard of sweet tea before, but that's probably because Aussie's aren't quite the pansies that the Poms are....

Good call, but sweet tea is what old ladies drink.

2012-09-03 Reply Admin

Anna is pretty impressive:

You said:whore Anna said:Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

You said:how are you Anna said:I'm fine, thank you for asking.

You said:halo Anna said:I wish I could play games, but I'm working. Maybe you could ask me something about IKEA.

You said:Football Anna said: I appreciate your interest in soccer, but is there anything you would like to know about IKEA? ouch?

You said:What;s your name? Anna said:That's not at all relevant to IKEA. Please ask me something else.

You said:I love you Anna said:How nice. I must have been a great help to make you feel like that. Now, ask me a question about IKEA.

2012-09-03 Reply Admin

I guess that's why they always say they're 'about' to release a stable and secure version :)

2012-09-03 Reply Admin

PiisAWheeL:
I think microsoft has a funny definition of the word "About". You are "about" to be logged off (in 10 years).
I wonder if it wont let you start new programs because windows is "shutting down".

I guess that's why they always say they're 'about' to release a stable and secure version :)

2012-09-03 Reply Admin

In the UK version Ann reacts differently:

You said:no
Anna said:As you wish, a no is a no, I respect your opinion.

Also the UK gets the blonde Ana - in the US and Canada you get the brunette version. The engine appears to be the same, but apparently some of the quirky answers were replaced.

2012-09-04 Reply Admin

The printer fail has made the rounds, e.g. http://cheezburger.com/5470678784 (site has been redesigned lately and all the votes reset, but the post to favourites count is accurate.)

CAPTCHA: dignissim: Trying to get this post past Akismet has consumed all of my dignissim.

2012-09-04 Reply Admin

Neil:
The printer fail has made the rounds, e.g. http://cheezburger.com/5470678784 (site has been redesigned lately and all the votes reset, but the post to favourites count is accurate.)
CAPTCHA: dignissim: Trying to get this post past Akismet has consumed all of my dignissim.

Bah, after all that I forgot to link the link in the first place...

CAPTCHA: suscipit: Akismet was more suscipit of this reply than my original post.

2012-09-04 Reply Admin

Neil:
Neil:
CAPTCHA: dignissim: Trying to get this post past Akismet has consumed all of my dignissim.
CAPTCHA: suscipit: Akismet was more suscipit of this reply than my original post.

CAPTCHA: nulla: After all that, it turns out that Akismet found nulla wrong with any of my posts.

2012-09-04 Reply Admin

da Doctah:
Anna works for IKEA. Maybe she'd understand no if you typed it in all caps and threw in a couple of umlauts.
And a hex wrench.

Hmmm... Would that be a metric hex wrench or an English hex wrench?

2012-09-08 Reply Admin

User support is not supported by this User Support Company offshore user support service provider.

2013-12-15 Reply Admin

Hasse:
But as a swede she knows the word "Nej"

Ah, right. I was thinking Swedish might be a language that genuinely doesn't have an equivalent of "no" (like Mandarin or Welsh).

Luck of the Draw

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