The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Cbuttius · 2014-02-17 Reply Admin

Of course midday is neither before (ante) meridian or after (post) meridian, it is meridian.

However the way numbers change, that happens when you reach the time, never before it, and then you put the minutes and seconds after it.

The logic is of course that 12:01pm is post-meridian and that should be one minute after 12:00pm, plus if you added in the seconds it would be 12:00:01pm one second after, so it is pm.

In reality the WTF is using "12 o'clock" when it should really be "0 o'clock" even using a 12-hour clock, and then it would make more sense that 0pm came before 1pm instead of the fact that 12am follows 11pm.

Anyone ever seen a clock with a 0 at the top instead of a 12? Would be a good idea to design one.

Of course it's hard in Roman Numerals as they didn't have a letter for 0 (or maybe they did, or how else did they represent it?). Maybe the letter O.

chubertdev · 2014-02-17 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
I don't think ints are involved because the current balance is -0.00 pounds. That's why they're demanding a payment of 0.00 pounds. Just a few days ago we were discussing (yet again) why displays of floating point numbers are only approximations of the values stored in a computer's memory.

Obviously, you would have to divide the result by 100 to get the balance in pounds.

2014-02-17 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Norman Diamond:
I don't think ints are involved because the current balance is -0.00 pounds. That's why they're demanding a payment of 0.00 pounds. Just a few days ago we were discussing (yet again) why displays of floating point numbers are only approximations of the values stored in a computer's memory.
Obviously, you would have to divide the result by 100 to get the balance in pounds.

Huh? Someone is storing a monetary value in floating point, in pounds. When displaying it they're rounding to the nearest penny, which is -0.00. Dividing by 100 would set the unit to hundreds of pounds, and they'd still do rounding in the display which would still only display an approximation of what they store in memory.

chubertdev · 2014-02-17 Reply Admin

We're just talking about two separate anti-patterns, with mine being in a fictional scenario based on previous WTFs, not limited to just this one.

2014-02-17 Reply Admin

Cbuttius:
In reality the WTF is using "12 o'clock" when it should really be "0 o'clock" even using a 12-hour clock, and then it would make more sense that 0pm came before 1pm instead of the fact that 12am follows 11pm.
Anyone ever seen a clock with a 0 at the top instead of a 12?

Yes, my microwave oven. As sensible as that would be if the microwave oven had a 24-hour clock, it's nonsense here where the microwave oven has a 12-hour clock. 0:00 means both midnight and noon. The maker is one of the WTF'est of Japan's giant conglomerates. They make nuclear reactors and medical equipment too.

Cbuttius:
Of course it's hard in Roman Numerals as they didn't have a letter for 0 (or maybe they did, or how else did they represent it?). Maybe the letter O.

No. They didn't have a letter for 0, and they didn't think of the idea of using letter O for it because they had no 0 on which to base the idea of a look-alike.

By the way, although the most common numeral system is called Hindu-Arabic in honour of the cultures from which all their digital base belong to us, their digits are rather different. The Arabic digit for "one" looks rather like 0.

2014-02-17 Reply Admin

John Adriaan:
I had to add a schedule to a monitoring program. Each event in the schedule had to have a start date-and-time and end date-and-time, to the minute, so of course specified 24-hour time. To resolve the end-of-day issue, their specification defined that each time could be in the range 00:01 to 23:59 "to avoid ambiguity", which of course put two minutes around midnight into limbo. Instead, I proposed slightly different definitions for the start and end times. The start time could be anything from 00:00 to 23:59. The end time could be anything from 00:01 to 24:00. That resolved the whole "beginning of the day" and "end of the day" issue - and all the users appreciated the lack of ambiguity.

Your design is excellent. For a while I was a user of a system that was designed like that, and I appreciated the lack of ambiguity.

But that accomplishment was dwarfed by the real WTF.

The remaining ambiguity was this: Were these hours and minutes in the time zone where the broker's server was located? Which server, as they have three around the world? Or the time zone where the exchange is? Which exchange, if two or more are cooperating? Or my time zone? They might or might not know my time zone. Or UTC? I didn't do enough trading to discover the answer to this.

2014-02-18 Reply Admin

studog:
Domino's ran a promotion in my area a couple years ago: at 10:00p pizzas of any size became $10 to order, and thereafter the pizza price tracked the wall clock: at 11:00p they were $11 to order etc.
Hardly believing my good fortune I called up my nearest Domino's and confirmed my order of 20 pizzas for $20 at 1:00a. The staffer put me on hold to talk to her manager, and then came back and told me "That's not the way it works". I argued that the printed advertising copy in my hand said otherwise, but they wouldn't put the order through. :-(

You got greedy. The cashier probably would not have batted an eye at selling you a single pizza for a dollar.

2014-02-18 Reply Admin

Norman Diamond:
Cbuttius:
In reality the WTF is using "12 o'clock" when it should really be "0 o'clock" even using a 12-hour clock, and then it would make more sense that 0pm came before 1pm instead of the fact that 12am follows 11pm.
Anyone ever seen a clock with a 0 at the top instead of a 12?
Yes, my microwave oven. As sensible as that would be if the microwave oven had a 24-hour clock, it's nonsense here where the microwave oven has a 12-hour clock. 0:00 means both midnight and noon. The maker is one of the WTF'est of Japan's giant conglomerates. They make nuclear reactors and medical equipment too.

Cbuttius:
Of course it's hard in Roman Numerals as they didn't have a letter for 0 (or maybe they did, or how else did they represent it?). Maybe the letter O.
No. They didn't have a letter for 0, and they didn't think of the idea of using letter O for it because they had no 0 on which to base the idea of a look-alike.
By the way, although the most common numeral system is called Hindu-Arabic in honour of the cultures from which all their digital base belong to us, their digits are rather different. The Arabic digit for "one" looks rather like 0.

You're thinking of the Arabic digit for "five". The Arabic digit for "one" looks rather like "1".

0٠ 1١ 2٢ 3٣ 4٤ 5٥ 6٦ 7٧ 8٨ 9٩

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

Zemm:
Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

They are wrong.

But by rights both 12am and 12 pm should be midnight: twelve hours before the "meridian" (noon). Hurry up and get rid of 12 hour time. Then we can have pedantic arguments over "24:00".

As anyone who's ever been in the military knows, there is no 24:00. 23:59 rolls directly to 00:00. Share and enjoy.

CATCHA: inhibeo - when she's sober my girlfriend's not much fun - she's totally inhibeo.

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

Time Pedant:
Just a minor rant: There is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. There's 12:00 Noon or 12:00 Midnight.
And for those who claim "it's obvious" I can easily find examples of signs where folks use 12:00 AM to mean Noon and 12:00 PM to mean midnight.

And of course time is just an illusion used to keep all the quarks from being in the same place at once...

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

It's 12pm for midday. The fact that hours are numbered 1..12 not 0..11 is the real WTF

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

Zemm:
by rights both 12am and 12 pm should be midnight: twelve hours before the "meridian" (noon). Hurry up and get rid of 12 hour time. Then we can have pedantic arguments over "24:00".

Is 1 AM one hour before the meridian? Is 2 AM one hour before the meridian? That's an interesting concept of time keeping: 12 AM, 11 AM, 10 AM, ..., Noon, 1 PM, 2 PM, ..., Midnight.

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

One woof for yes, two woofs for no.

2014-02-24 Reply Admin

Though I love television listings here.

Because you see "Airing Fri at 25:30" "Thu at 26:00"

Sometimes it's clarified: "Watch next Saturday (Late Night) At 25:45"

2024-03-01 Reply Admin

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