The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

chubertdev · 2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Not Hans:
Not Hans:
Jordan:
The WTF isn't the desktop among the BBQs. It's that it's a /bilingual/ desktop....

I speaks Windows and Linux.

It*

Stupid no edit. It's a real genitus

I read it in Gollum's voice.

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

ochrist:
P. Almonius:
This is why Little Bobby Tables from xkcd always sat alone at lunch.

I thought that was because he deleted all the other students.

And the restaurant owner is warning others not to join him lest they suffer the same fate. No WTF.

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Annonymous:
Actually the point is the sample image is an American Express card.

Thanks. After you pointing it out for the 42th time, I finally got it too. @Editor, it would have been more funny if the "American Express" text in the image was actually, like, readable.

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

ANON:
In javascript you shouldn't escape the ampersands.
If you write
<script type="text/javascript">alert("&");</script>
you'll see a window with "&" as text.
<script type="text/javascript">alert("&");</script>
is what you want and properly what was tested.

...demonstrates improper escaping for JavaScript. If you want to escape characters for JS you need \xx format...

the following will pop up an ampersand...

<script type="text/javascript">alert("\26");</script>

and the following will pop up an ampersand, followed by the letters "amp" followed by a semicolon.

<script type="text/javascript">alert("\26amp\3B");</script>

no laughing matter · 2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Hey guys, did you notice that the picture is actually an American Express card?

foo AKA fooo:
Thanks. After you pointing it out for the 42th time, I finally got it too. @Editor, it would have been more funny if the "American Express" text in the image was actually, like, readable.

Well, complaining that editors embellish the submitted stories makes sense, but do you really believe they reduce the quality of the submitted images?

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

nobody:
ANON:
In javascript you shouldn't escape the ampersands.
If you write
<script type="text/javascript">alert("&");</script>
you'll see a window with "&" as text.
<script type="text/javascript">alert("&");</script>
is what you want and properly what was tested.
...demonstrates improper escaping for JavaScript. If you want to escape characters for JS you need \xx format...

the following will pop up an ampersand...
<script type="text/javascript">alert("\26");</script>
and the following will pop up an ampersand, followed by the letters "amp" followed by a semicolon.
<script type="text/javascript">alert("\26amp\3B");</script>

But you don't NEED to escape the ampersand in Javascript.

operagost · 2013-11-15 Reply Admin

JM:
2. It's well known that there's no potential for LHC to accidentally create a long-lived black hole.

Yeah, we won't be living long for sure.

operagost · 2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
So of course the next time I was in a shop in a position to buy something sufficiently pricey for it to be reasonable, I pulled out the Amex instead of my Mastercard or my Visa.(**)
And the guy behind the counter looked at it like it was a week-dead non-iced herring, because I'd picked on a budget PC parts shop and he didn't have the margins to be able to afford the extra transaction fees on Amex cards. Sigh.

It totally makes sense for a retailer to get an account with AmEx, then give their customers dirty looks for using the card...

tin · 2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Steve The Cynic:
Actually, the key point is that Visa and Mastercard charge significantly less for transactions than American Express does.

Correct. Roughly 5 times the rate in fact. Which means almost zero businesses (at least in Australia) actually accept them.

Also, I'm guessing the website designer used that image because it was freely available already somewhere... Simple Google images search for "credit card verification number example" shows a heck of a lot of Amex images and not many others.

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

no laughing matter:
Hey guys, did you notice that the picture is actually an American Express card?

Not at first sight anyway cause I never had one.

foo AKA fooo:
Thanks. After you pointing it out for the 42th time, I finally got it too. @Editor, it would have been more funny if the "American Express" text in the image was actually, like, readable.
Well, complaining that editors embellish the submitted stories makes sense, but do you really believe they reduce the quality of the submitted images?

Yes, next question?

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

First thing I thought when reading "sun outage" was "what's the big deal? I have several hours of sun outage every day." XD

lolwtf · 2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Windows has detected a hard disk problem > You should have started the backup process a long time ago. It's too late now. > Ask me again later

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

Alert: Oracle outages expected this week

FTFY

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

Wyrm:
First thing I thought when reading "sun outage" was "what's the big deal? I have several hours of sun outage every day." XD

So sorry.

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

Or would the point be, that in the security code picture aid, there actually is a pic of Amercan Express card?

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

PC Amok:
Do not JOIN tables? OK, that's just a technicality: SELECT seats FROM Table27 UNION SELECT seats FROM Table28

Thats not a join but a union.

In a join you merge rows from one table to rows of another so that some columns come from the first and some from the later.

In a union you just stack rows on top of each other.

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

15,000 BTU graphics card? Must be Nvidia.

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

And you do realize that the help image says American Express on top, right?

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

I assumed that the WTF was not accepting AMEX whilst having a big picture showing you where to find the security code on an AMEX card - but if that's your biggest WTF, you're doing pretty well.

2013-11-16 Reply Admin

lolwtf:
Windows has detected a hard disk problem > You should have started the backup process a long time ago. It's too late now. > Ask me again later

As a matter of fact it is nice to know that I should replace the disk now and restore a backup whose process I've been running for years. Really, it is nice to know to replace the disk before a second and third go bad too.

It's even nice that Microsoft finally learned how to let backups be made in a reliable manner, instead of destroying backups. I just wish they hadn't taken so many years to learn. http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/w95_fdisk_format/

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

For the record, even if the LHC could create a micro black hole, it would have no more gravitational pull than the particles it was made up of.

Or, in layman's terms, "sod all". It would be highly debateable as to whether it would even have an event horizon due to the rather stronger gravitational pull of the Earth.

Gravity is a stupidly weak force at the scales the LHC works.

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

The problem with using the current LHC is that the collisions are destructive, and it is the result of the destruction by collision that is being detected, so the mass of the result will NEVER be enough to create even the most microscopic of black holes - as noted above.

Perhaps we could actually create a black hole if we created a Large Hadron Coalescer (if that's even a word), the sole purpose of which would be to coalesce [an additive rather than destructice process] the injected particles to a singualarity, of course this is all tongue in cheek - I doubt it's possible.

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

Not just a technicality.

That's not the functional equivalent of a JOIN.

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

anonymous:
But you don't NEED to escape the ampersand in Javascript.

In Javascript? No. In Javascript fragments embedded in a web page? Possibly, depending on whether the browser is treating the page as XHTML or as HTML. If the former, the document must be valid XML - the fact that the ampersand in question is part of an embedded JS fragment means nothing.

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

Hiro:
Rnd(:
Designer liked that stockphoto? It also works with my VISAs atleast the backside one...

So TRWTF is a designer who placed stock photo selection above design specs.

TRWTF would be a designer who actually reads the text of the graphics.

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

You have some severe database normalization issues here that you may find are more that a technicality when it comes to maintaining your system.

And tech folks don't believe in unions either.

2013-11-17 Reply Admin

Bblalalrrrhghgh!! Noooo!!

Join and union are vastly different.

Union appends rows to a set - eg set of first 3 even numbers and first 3 letters is: {a} {b} {c} {2} {4} {6}

An inner join of the same two sets (where a=1, b=2, etc) would give: {2, b}

There are ways to fake a join eg

SELECT Item1, Item2 from Table1 where Item2 in (SELECT Item2 from Table2)

but it's slow and a horrible horrible way of doing things.

Ok ... I'm good now. Rant over :)

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

Dhamp:
For the record, even if the LHC could create a micro black hole, it would have no more gravitational pull than the particles it was made up of.

Incorrect - you need to take the effective mass into account, which includes the mass gained through relativistic speeds. That can a far more than the particle mass.

You'd still stay at a few atom masses.

Dhamp:
Or, in layman's terms, "sod all". It would be highly debateable as to whether it would even have an event horizon due to the rather stronger gravitational pull of the Earth.

Massively incorrect. The event horizon would be so near to the particle that its gravitational pull would be larger than that of any non-blackhole mass, including the sun.

Dhamp:
Gravity is a stupidly weak force at the scales the LHC works.

Entirely incorrect. The LHC's core is where particles collide. Which is exactly the scale at which a micro black hole would be created (if at all). Or, put another way: If a micro black hole is created, then something significant at the scale where gravity is strong did happen.

LHC black holes, even if they are created, are irrelevant for two reasons:

They would condense into something so tiny that they'd simply fly through all atoms. They'd need to hit an atom's nucleus directly to absorb it. Calculations say that such an event would happen once per millenium or so. Assuming that the black hole's orbit around the earth core is entirely underground (yeah, it could orbit for millenia without any friction - it's not hitting anything after all).
Hawking radiation takes mass out of black holes. This radiation gets stronger as the hole gets smaller, so it's a self-accelerating process. Any tiny black hole in the LHC is way below the threshold where this process is already deep down that death spiral; you'll get a shower of particles, similar to what you're getting anyway.

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

um, I think the actual point here is that the example photo showed an American Express card, but it was not one of the options to choose from.

It's more a comment on a not so careful use of clip art vs a commentary on the rates of various cards or the business decision to not allow Amex but require a higher profit margin card (to the merchant).

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

ok, apparently the dozens of responses pre-stating this observation - totally mooted by point.

In my defense, i didn't expand the comments and only the GP comment was visible.

Sorry for helping to belabor a long dead point.

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

TRWTF is that anybody is stupid enough to pay for the "privileged" of having an AMEX card when most banks will hand you a Visa or Mastercard for free. Why pay for a card that a lot of places won't take?

The list of places that take AMEX but not Visa and/or Mastercard is practically zero, whereas the reverse is huge.

Also - did anybody notice that the Dell desktop is bilingual? WTF?!?

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

S:
anonymous:
But you don't NEED to escape the ampersand in Javascript.

In Javascript? No. In Javascript fragments embedded in a web page? Possibly, depending on whether the browser is treating the page as XHTML or as HTML. If the former, the document must be valid XML - the fact that the ampersand in question is part of an embedded JS fragment means nothing.

The post I directly replied to wasn't talking about XHTML, it was talking about escaping the ampersand for Javascript in regular HTML. While you certainly can, you don't need to.

chubertdev · 2013-11-18 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

The best part is the HTML comments.

chubertdev · 2013-11-18 Reply Admin

David Mårtensson:
PC Amok:
Do not JOIN tables? OK, that's just a technicality: SELECT seats FROM Table27 UNION SELECT seats FROM Table28

Thats not a join but a union.

In a join you merge rows from one table to rows of another so that some columns come from the first and some from the later.

In a union you just stack rows on top of each other.

They all come back in the same results set, which I think is the main objective.

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

We have sun outages every day. We call it "night".

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

Anon:
Also - did anybody notice that the Dell desktop is bilingual? WTF?!?

If the advertisement means that the first user or the person doing reinstallation can choose which language Windows will use[*], why do you call that a WTF?

If the brand were Fujitsu or NEC or maybe some others, the BIOS might allow the user to set which language the BIOS will use. I haven't seen that in Dell, but I haven't seen every Dell. Why do you call that a WTF?

[* Some Windows editions make this less necessary than others, but the file system of the Windows drive (usually C:) is still affected to some degree by which language was selected during installation.]

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Norman Diamond:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
The best part is the HTML comments.

The other best part is the RSS feed.

2013-11-18 Reply Admin

Re: "For years, I've joked that most computer problems are actually caused by things like neutrinos hitting a hard drive platter and flipping random bits. In this image that M. sent in after a visit to the Universe of Particles exhibition at CERN, I think that I might be on to something." - I used to work at a steel manufacturing plant where I had to maintain a couple of PCs with old-fashioned CRT monitors sitting next to active plasma cutters, on a good day the screen looked like that, on a bad day, the text and images would be rainbow colored and stretched beyond recognition...

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Waiter, can I do a left join? How about an inner join?

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Depends on your needs. I'm dyslexic, and have problems with numbers. I can't use chip and pin cards. I have chip and sign cards, visa, mastercard and AMEX.

AMEX are the only card company who will actually help a customer in this position when a place that takes AMEX refused it because it's a signature card. AMEX treat this as a breach of merchant contract. Visa/MC tell you they can't do anything to help that their backed card is being refused because it's C&S not C&P.

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
Anon:
Also - did anybody notice that the Dell desktop is bilingual? WTF?!?
If the advertisement means that the first user or the person doing reinstallation can choose which language Windows will use[*], why do you call that a WTF?
If the brand were Fujitsu or NEC or maybe some others, the BIOS might allow the user to set which language the BIOS will use. I haven't seen that in Dell, but I haven't seen every Dell. Why do you call that a WTF?

[* Some Windows editions make this less necessary than others, but the file system of the Windows drive (usually C:) is still affected to some degree by which language was selected during installation.]

That's no bilingual. That's just selecting what language you want to use when you set it up.

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Chloe Red:
Depends on your needs. I'm dyslexic, and have problems with numbers. I can't use chip and pin cards. I have chip and sign cards, visa, mastercard and AMEX.
AMEX are the only card company who will actually help a customer in this position when a place that takes AMEX refused it because it's a signature card. AMEX treat this as a breach of merchant contract. Visa/MC tell you they can't do anything to help that their backed card is being refused because it's C&S not C&P.

Hardly seems worth paying for. If a retailer doesn't want your money, that's their problem. But C&P is a massive PITA anyway. As somebody who has traveled in Europe with US bank cards (not chip and anything) it's annoying when the sales drone get confused when you tell them your card doesn't have a chip.

On the other hand, I've never quite understood the lack of concern most US retailers show towards credit cards. It's rare for them to even check the signature.

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
lolwtf:
Windows has detected a hard disk problem > You should have started the backup process a long time ago. It's too late now. > Ask me again later
As a matter of fact it is nice to know that I should replace the disk now and restore a backup whose process I've been running for years. Really, it is nice to know to replace the disk before a second and third go bad too.
It's even nice that Microsoft finally learned how to let backups be made in a reliable manner, instead of destroying backups. I just wish they hadn't taken so many years to learn. http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/w95_fdisk_format/

If the best you have is 9x, then your whole point is irrelevant. For example NT 4 wasn't affected, so your statement "finally learned" is factually incorrect, because bug affected only 95 and 98.

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Radioactive Man:
Re: "For years, I've joked that most computer problems are actually caused by things like neutrinos hitting a hard drive platter and flipping random bits. In this image that M. sent in after a visit to the Universe of Particles exhibition at CERN, I think that I might be on to something." - I used to work at a steel manufacturing plant where I had to maintain a couple of PCs with old-fashioned CRT monitors sitting next to active plasma cutters, on a good day the screen looked like that, on a bad day, the text and images would be rainbow colored and stretched beyond recognition...

That's not caused by neutrinos, it's caused by the gigantic magnetic fields fucking with the CRT's electron gun's aim.

2013-11-19 Reply Admin

Klimax:
Norman Diamond:
lolwtf:
Windows has detected a hard disk problem > You should have started the backup process a long time ago. It's too late now. > Ask me again later
As a matter of fact it is nice to know that I should replace the disk now and restore a backup whose process I've been running for years. Really, it is nice to know to replace the disk before a second and third go bad too.
It's even nice that Microsoft finally learned how to let backups be made in a reliable manner, instead of destroying backups. I just wish they hadn't taken so many years to learn. http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/w95_fdisk_format/
If the best you have is 9x, then your whole point is irrelevant. For example NT 4 wasn't affected, so your statement "finally learned" is factually incorrect, because bug affected only 95 and 98.

I had to repeat backups several times, losing them several times before finding a workaround. Even a retail store made a sacrifice, turning new unopened merchandise into used merchandise while trying to track down the problem. OEMs wasted time and effort trying to track down the problem.

Do you suppose it was accidental that NT4 worked (so Microsoft "finally learned" years later) or do you suppose it was intentional that NT4 worked (so Microsoft intentionally continued selling data-destroying 95 OSR2 and 98 after they knew what was wrong)?

The worst I had was 9x. Why do you call that irrelevant? Even when I bought NT4, I still had to pay for 9x licences on every PC.

2013-11-20 Reply Admin

To be fair, AMEX only started to charge here this year. If I had stayed with my last bank when they took my C&S visa away, I'd have got an AMEX and Mastercard from them as a replacement, the idea being to use the AMEX as the main card, with the MC as a backup on the same account for places that don't take AMEX.

And that's not my idea on how to use them, that's the banks.

Plus my AMEX is a loyalty card for a supermarket too.. I pay £25 a year now to have it, and get around £200 back from actually using it, so I see that as a £175 gain, not a £25 loss.

2013-11-21 Reply Admin

Do you mean the students by the window, or the students by the door?

drop wooden table on students by door

You don't have the wooden table.

take wooden table

It's too heavy.

2013-11-21 Reply Admin

If you can't join a table, how are you meant to eat?!

2013-11-21 Reply Admin

J. Freed:
Do you mean the students by the window, or the students by the door?

drop wooden table on students by door

You don't have the wooden table.

take wooden table

It's too heavy.

> gdt

take wooden table

TAKEN

[*]

drop wooden table on students by door

Students take revenge by stealing the bottle from the table.

[* I forgot how to exit from the game debugging tool. To the best of my recollection there was no prompt when gdt was reading commands. Most of the gdt commands were different from ordinary commands, but take was the same.]

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