• Anne (unregistered)

    Re: Is childbearing's a word? Yes, or it is a contraction of two words. 's can be used as a contraction of the word is, as a contraction of the word has, or to indicate possession. In the first of the following two sentences, childbearing's is a contraction of two words. In the third, it is one (possessive) word.

    They agreed that childbearing's hard. They agreed that childbearing's happened in various circumstances. They agreed that childbearing's worst aspect is often the uncertainty as to how long a difficult labor will last.

  • Bill (unregistered) in reply to SNF
    SNF:
    Michael:
    Lol! The funniest part about the first picture was not the Coke ad failure, but the McDonalds ad.

    OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAND FA!!!!!

    Forgive me, I haven't been to McDonald's in probably ten years. What the hell are FA? And what does "McDonald's Level 1" mean? For a while I was certain that was another error message.

    That's an animated advert, so a single screenshot taken out of context won't mean much.

    The FA is the Football Association. McDonalds in the UK sponsor some of their initiatives so that they can claim to be encouraging a healthy lifestyle.

    The advert is probably saying something like they've paid for 9000 level 1 coaches for kids' football teams.

  • Kuba (unregistered)

    I think that the real WTF is that they use more-or-less stock Windows-based PCs to run the display system. A relatively small embedded system (may be even XP Embedded) could run this display off flash memory, forever and without problems. It could of course update the content over the network.

    I always wonder why people can't just buy some $500 embedded, fanless PC, load up a basic, say, Linux install, and set it up correctly, for what's essentially an uptime limited by maintenance power-offs. The whole player software load, including kernel and remote updater, would be probably ~5MB. It's really not that hard, I see a prototype in about a week's time.

    I don't know what sort of input the display electronics takes, presumably it uses analog VGA inputs. Then all you need in Linux is a small wrapper around the ogg demux and theora codec, to update the framebuffer device. No need for X or anything of the sort. It's a simple matter to have remote ssh access and put it on the net for push-style content installs, or to have it self-fetch new content from some website. Probably both would need to be present.

    All the system itself needs to run is some sort of an init, the ssh server, the updater, and the display application. Maybe a dhcp agent to keep the network interface's address up-to-date. Oh, busybox executable would need to be there of course. Some diet/tiny C library to go with it. And the ogg and openssl libraries. Small, easy, fun, once done it doesn't require much in the way of maintenance. Probably none, bar need for a codec update. Power it off when you feel like it (the flash should be mounted read-only by default), same goes for power-up.

    XP? Please, not.

  • user (unregistered) in reply to Picky
    Picky:
    Have you actually looked at the picture? Signs are all correct way around and the comment of going the "wrong way around" is to reflect that the English drive on the "wrong" side of the road.

    It is a well proven fact: In England, you do not drive on the right side of the road. (Pun intended)

  • (cs) in reply to th30519
    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.
    (rather offtopic) Not me. On this computer, svchost.exe constantly crashes, taking along with it the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing service* and the internet connection stops working until I restart. That is, unless I don't press either of the Send/Don't send buttons and just move the dialog in the bottom right corner of the desktop so that it's only barely visible - then everything's fine unless I press one of the buttons by mistake (really annoying if it pops up while I'm typing something). Right now I have about 10 of the windows piled up in the corner.

    Also, restarting the service shows an "access denied" error, and I haven't figured out how to solve this (the crashing). If anyone has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

    *Windows Firewall is, by the way, disabled. And I'm not currently sharing the connection, but occasionally I need to, so I can't just disable the service.

  • (cs) in reply to LiquidFire
    LiquidFire:
    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.
    (rather offtopic) Not me. On this computer, svchost.exe constantly crashes, taking along with it the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing service* and the internet connection stops working until I restart. That is, unless I don't press either of the Send/Don't send buttons and just move the dialog in the bottom right corner of the desktop so that it's only barely visible - then everything's fine unless I press one of the buttons by mistake (really annoying if it pops up while I'm typing something). Right now I have about 10 of the windows piled up in the corner.

    Also, restarting the service shows an "access denied" error, and I haven't figured out how to solve this (the crashing). If anyone has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

    *Windows Firewall is, by the way, disabled. And I'm not currently sharing the connection, but occasionally I need to, so I can't just disable the service.

    Dump your antivirus. There are better things in life than relying on some intrusive crap.

  • tristique (unregistered) in reply to Frunobulax

    this is one of the funniest comments I've read on tdw ...

  • eryn (unregistered)

    The the impotence of proofreading By Taylor Mali www.taylormali.com

    Has this ever happened to you? You work very horde on a paper for English clash And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=) and all because you are the word¹s liverwurst spoiler. Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.

    This is a problem that affects manly, manly students. I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term that my English teacher in my sophomoric year, Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague. And that¹s all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague. Not just anal community colleague, because I wouldn¹t be happy at anal community colleague. I needed a place that would offer me intellectual simulation, I really need to be challenged, challenged dentally. I know this makes me sound like a stereo, but I really wanted to go to an ivory legal collegue. So I needed to improvement or gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison (in Prison, New Jersey).

    So I got myself a spell checker and figured I was on Sleazy Street.

    But there are several missed aches that a spell chukker can¹t can¹t catch catch. For instant, if you accidentally leave a word your spell exchequer won¹t put it in you. And God for billing purposes only you should have serial problems with Tori Spelling your spell Chekhov might replace a word with one you had absolutely no detention of using. Because what do you want it to douch? It only does what you tell it to douche. You¹re the one with your hand on the mouth going clit, clit, clit. It just goes to show you how embargo one careless clit of the mouth can be.

    Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint. The teacher read my entire paper on A Sale of Two Titties out loud to all of my assmates. I¹m not joking, I¹m totally cereal. It was the most humidifying experience of my life, being laughed at pubically.

    So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice: One: There is no prostitute for careful editing. And three: When it comes to proofreading, the red penis your friend.

  • (cs) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    The iPhone is bit peculiar but simply a matter of linquistics. It says "since the last FULL charge". I often charge my electronic equipment without providing a full charge. It's like adding gasoline to the car without a complete fill-up (who can afford it nowadays?!)
    Off topic, but where does this gas thing come from? It's not like you'll use less if you don't fill up. Why can you afford $40 in gas if you buy it in two $20 chunks? ("It's almost payday" or similar excluded.) And really, with the price of gas trending up, it's more like $20 + $21 than $20 + $20.

    (Also excepted: if you are good at predicting the motion of gas prices and think it will drop.)

    Niels:
    The real WTF is that Firefox doesn't suggest the correct spelling of "disappearing" at all.
    The real WTF is Firefox's spell checker in general. I can't count the number of times that it has not had a commonly-used word in its dictionary. E.g. "okay". (OK, most people spell it "OK", but "okay" isn't exactly uncommon either.)
    dpm:
    The real WTF is that anyone would use any browser's spellchecker.
    Um, why is this a WTF? I personally love it. It cuts down on typos in my forum posts dramatically. Or do you prefer to write posts in another program then copy them over?

    (Okay, so you could argue that The Real WTF is that more systems don't have spell checking as a standard component to a text box like this. I think OS X does it, but I don't think anyone else does. So it's not a WTF that people use it on other systems because it's what's available.)

  • LEGO (unregistered) in reply to Jeroen Brattinga
    Jeroen Brattinga:
    Hmmm... Firefox 3 (beta 4) has a whole new set of suggestions: among other -- childrearing (WTF?), God-fearing and ball-bearing!

    Ball-bearing, is that a new gender specific adjective?

    -Lego

  • jk (unregistered) in reply to Frunobulax
    Frunobulax:
    For those who mentioned the potential McDonald's wtf:

    It probably means 9,500 Fat-Asses. Once the McDonald's at that particular location creates its 10,000th Fat-Ass, it will achieve Level 2.

    sorry, but shouldn't that be "fat-arses?"

    captcha - tation. captchatation, fast food nation.

  • a hat (unregistered)

    TRWTF #1: Firefox's spell checker. TRWTF #2: That each program has to implement its own spell checking.

    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.
    TRWTF #3: Not turning off that useless "Error Reporting Service". Like Microsoft needs to know every time some program they didn't make (or I made, even) crashes. TRWTF #4: My cat.

  • (cs)

    Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Error Reporting -> Disable Error Reporting

  • m0ffx (unregistered)

    I'd say the Coca-Cola one's in contention for the largest error message ever (it's about 8 foot high I reckon). Wonder what the actual record is? (And pointing your projector at the moon doesn't count, unless you can actually see the image, in which case I want your projector)

  • ummm (unregistered) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    I think that the real WTF is that they use more-or-less stock Windows-based PCs to run the display system. A relatively small embedded system (may be even XP Embedded) could run this display off flash memory, forever and without problems. It could of course update the content over the network.

    I always wonder why people can't just buy some $500 embedded, fanless PC, load up a basic, say, Linux install, and set it up correctly, for what's essentially an uptime limited by maintenance power-offs. The whole player software load, including kernel and remote updater, would be probably ~5MB. It's really not that hard, I see a prototype in about a week's time.

    I don't know what sort of input the display electronics takes, presumably it uses analog VGA inputs. Then all you need in Linux is a small wrapper around the ogg demux and theora codec, to update the framebuffer device. No need for X or anything of the sort. It's a simple matter to have remote ssh access and put it on the net for push-style content installs, or to have it self-fetch new content from some website. Probably both would need to be present.

    All the system itself needs to run is some sort of an init, the ssh server, the updater, and the display application. Maybe a dhcp agent to keep the network interface's address up-to-date. Oh, busybox executable would need to be there of course. Some diet/tiny C library to go with it. And the ogg and openssl libraries. Small, easy, fun, once done it doesn't require much in the way of maintenance. Probably none, bar need for a codec update. Power it off when you feel like it (the flash should be mounted read-only by default), same goes for power-up.

    XP? Please, not.

    pretty much everything you said is something that has failed for one reason or another. network could go down, vga could short, ram or flash could flake out. it's not that something reasonable couldn't (and hasn't) been done using a thin client or tiny linux install. but making the system smaller doesn't automatically make it more fault tolerant.

    what you want is redundancy and the ability for the system to detect and trap its own errors, so that you don't have to spend all day figuring out what went wrong.

    i wonder if they were using viewpoint media player though :D

  • Jay Watson (unregistered) in reply to Michael

    Has anyone stopped to consider that this might be an April Fools Day joke?

  • The_Assimilator (unregistered) in reply to LiquidFire
    LiquidFire:
    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.
    (rather offtopic) Not me. On this computer, svchost.exe constantly crashes, taking along with it the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing service* and the internet connection stops working until I restart. That is, unless I don't press either of the Send/Don't send buttons and just move the dialog in the bottom right corner of the desktop so that it's only barely visible - then everything's fine unless I press one of the buttons by mistake (really annoying if it pops up while I'm typing something). Right now I have about 10 of the windows piled up in the corner.

    Also, restarting the service shows an "access denied" error, and I haven't figured out how to solve this (the crashing). If anyone has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

    *Windows Firewall is, by the way, disabled. And I'm not currently sharing the connection, but occasionally I need to, so I can't just disable the service.

    My brother's PC has the same problem and the only solution seems to be a Windows reinstall >:(. I'm just waiting for XP Service Pack 3 before I take that plunge though.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to m0ffx
    m0ffx:
    I'd say the Coca-Cola one's in contention for the largest error message ever (it's about 8 foot high I reckon). Wonder what the actual record is?

    The Idiot's "Mission Accomplished" banner was a pretty large error.

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to Zock
    Zock:
    Ceiswyn:
    Ahem. I think you'll find that we drive on the correct side of the road, and it's you godless heathens overseas that do it wrong :)

    Ah, the benefits of living on an island trying desperately to hold on archaic habits. :)

    Yes, I know what you mean. Clinging on to archaisms such as "oftentimes"; use of the subjunctive where others prefer the indicative ("I insist that you be..." versus "I insist that you are..."); a fondness for throwback Latin spellings ("color"); insisting on the Ancient Greek suffix -ize over the more modern French -ise...

    So when did the US become an island? ;)

  • (cs) in reply to a hat
    a hat:
    TRWTF #1: Firefox's spell checker. TRWTF #2: That each program has to implement its own spell checking.

    The alternative being a spellcheck api provided by microsoft? People would cry monopoly! Imagine the Spell Check wars "It's part of the OS!", culminating in MS being forced to make their spellchecker uninstallable. <shudder> Program access and defaults: Default spell checker:

    • Use my current spell check
    • Microsoft Windows Spellcheck
    • Firefox wonder spellcheck
    • Open office open spellcheck
    <runs for the hills>
  • latrína. (unregistered) in reply to th30519

    no, i don't have this psychologic problem, i do not use ms windblows.

  • bob (unregistered)

    Actually, "childbearing's" is a perfectly valid word. For example:

    "Childbearing's many risks have been significantly reduced in countries with modern medicine."

  • Maarten (unregistered) in reply to th30519
    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.

    That's not a smart reflex. I don't know for sure about XP, but in Vista there is actually a chance you will get helpfull feedback right after sending the report. It has helped me on more than 1 occasion already.

  • Sean (unregistered)

    My walls are load bearing, my wife's womb is childbearing.

  • Vegeta (unregistered) in reply to Frunobulax

    ITS OVER 9000!!!!

  • Freddy Bob (unregistered)

    Call anyone explain why the iPhone is not on a wooden table?

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to EvanED
    EvanED:
    (Okay, so you could argue that The Real WTF is that more systems don't have spell checking as a standard component to a text box like this. I think OS X does it, but I don't think anyone else does. So it's not a WTF that people use it on other systems because it's what's available.)

    OS X has a spell checking API that's available to any application that wants to offer such a feature. Likewise, it is possible to add custom service providers in case the user isn't happy with the default spell checker's behavior. For users of German dictionaries at least I recommend cocoAspell over the one that ships with Tiger any time. (I don't know about Leopard yet.)

  • Me (unregistered) in reply to John
    John:
    TGV:
    Flash:
    Robajob:
    Doesn't "chilbearing's" just mean "of childbearing"?

    Yep. Here's a sample sentence:

    "She was not looking forward to childbearing's pain."

    Perhaps my sarcasm detector needs recalibrating, but the genitive suffix ('s) can be used when "of" is used in a possessive, or physical part relation, not for general involvement and causative relations (the shock of the accident vs. the accident's shock).

    It seems to me that "The dog's idea of a good time was..." defies the rule you laid out in regards to physical part relation. As I've understood it, 's is usable on a noun to indicate possession of the next word. In this case, "childbearing's pain" satisfies the rules I've learned growing up, and I suspect that a non-trivial number of other people might also make the same mistake as me, at which point it becomes dangerously close to valid.

    colorless green ideas sleep furiously (look it up in wikipedia)

  • Me (unregistered) in reply to alegr
    alegr:
    LiquidFire:
    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.
    (rather offtopic) Not me. On this computer, svchost.exe constantly crashes, taking along with it the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing service* and the internet connection stops working until I restart. That is, unless I don't press either of the Send/Don't send buttons and just move the dialog in the bottom right corner of the desktop so that it's only barely visible - then everything's fine unless I press one of the buttons by mistake (really annoying if it pops up while I'm typing something). Right now I have about 10 of the windows piled up in the corner.

    Also, restarting the service shows an "access denied" error, and I haven't figured out how to solve this (the crashing). If anyone has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

    *Windows Firewall is, by the way, disabled. And I'm not currently sharing the connection, but occasionally I need to, so I can't just disable the service.

    Dump your antivirus. There are better things in life than relying on some intrusive crap.

    Didn't he JUST say that the firewall was disabled?

  • Your hero (unregistered) in reply to th30519

    http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-003

    "Stop windows from asking if you want to send an error report.. ...program crash"

  • Nick (unregistered) in reply to th30519
    th30519:
    Did anybody else click on the "Don't Send" button when they saw it? Its nearly an reflex for me to immediately click "Don't Sent" when windows gives that message.

    did the same thing :p how stupid of us

  • (cs)

    Hehehehehe... those borders bucks, they're about to actually be worth $0! It was just prescient!

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