The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

dcardani:
Anonymous:
The Kflickr dialog makes a lot more sense when icons are enabled on pushbuttons:

http://kflickr.sourceforge.net/wikka.php?wakka=Screen

No it doesn't. What's the difference between "OK (Down Arrow)", "OK," and "OK (Up Arrow)?" That's still confusing as hell.

I interpret that as "OK and next", "OK and close", and "OK and previous". The arrows should be pointing left and right, though.

EvanED · 2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
dcardani:
Anonymous:
The Kflickr dialog makes a lot more sense when icons are enabled on pushbuttons:

http://kflickr.sourceforge.net/wikka.php?wakka=Screen

No it doesn't. What's the difference between "OK (Down Arrow)", "OK," and "OK (Up Arrow)?" That's still confusing as hell.

I interpret that as "OK and next", "OK and close", and "OK and previous". The arrows should be pointing left and right, though.

I disagree on your last point. Look at <a href="http://kflickr.sourceforge.net/wikka.php?wakka=Screen">the screenshots</a> someone posted earlier. The main window that leads to this displays a list -- in vertical format -- of the pictures (at least in the option settings that are shown). The up and down arrows make that list agree with this dialog.

marvin_rabbit · 2006-06-02 Reply Admin

DZ-Jay:
marvin_rabbit:
nsimeonov:
24:00 is actually invalid so there are no ambiguities at all. 24h clock goes from 00:00 to 23:59

And just to head off anyone that tries to make the argument (if anyone were to try to do so) , 24:00 still isn't valid even when a Leap Second is declared. In that case the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00.

(Just wanting to throw out trivia.)

OK, I'll bite. First, a link to the Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Midnight_00:00_and_24:00

I only offer that to make it easier for anybody to find and read it, as I don't trust Wikipedia, so here's another resource with the same:

    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Now, how about a more "official" page, say, an IBM reference on locales:

    http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/locales/date_time.jsp

Here's a brief excerpt from that page:

In the ISO/IEC twenty-four-hour system, 24:00 is midnight at the end of a day, and 00:01 is one minute after midnight of the next day. The sequence is 23:59, 24:00, 00:01. In ISO/IEC standard 8601, both 24:00 and 00:00 are allowed to indicate midnight, with 24:00 indicating the end of the day and 00:00 indicating the start of the next day.
(emphasis mine.)

Did you even look it up, or did you just *thought* that it was invalid, and therefore assumed it must be so?

     -dZ.

WWWWHHHHHAAAACCCKK!!!! Ouch... Damn! That's the second time I've been hit with a clue-by-four today!

Although, I will take some slight solace in that at least one of your links confims that the seconds do go to 60 for a leap second, instead of rolling to the next minute.

Still... Damn that hurts.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

I disagree.

The UI is fucked, there should be "save" button and a "close" button.
it's 2006 let's drop the ok'ing and cancel'ing.
And the window should be non-blocking so i could open multiple instances of the window on diffrent images. (offcourse not on the same image, because that would be stupid) (and also offcourse, for all i know it could already be so, but then there would be no use for the "ok, next img" button or "ok, previous img" button.

Coughptcha · 2006-06-02 Reply Admin

DZ-Jay:

... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

"In case an unambiguous representation of time is required, 00:00 is usually the preferred notation for midnight and not 24:00."

24:00 yesterday is the same instant in time as 00:00 today ... but the standards don't go past 24:00. So a millisecond past that instant in time would not be 24:00:00.001 but rather 00:00:00.001.

Although that wouldn't stop me from writing an application which internally tracked time of, say, 26:00 to indicate 2am on the next day (e.g. when processing transactions actually associated with the previous day). I just wouldn't represent it that way externally.

But if you want to debate me, I'm 5 foot 14 inches tall.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

please excuse me this was my first post here, and i was under the impression that i was quoting someone.

In the above post i was replying to the kflicker comment that thaught the buttons actually made some sort of sense.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
ParkinT:

Anonymous:

Must have been using the Date calculation from The Trouble with Blind Dates

Hoooold on there Bobalouie!

1:00PM IS earlier than 12:59PM

There is nothing wrong there!

The WTF WTFer got WTF'ed?

Recursively, or iteratively?

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Anonymous:
ParkinT:

Anonymous:

Must have been using the Date calculation from The Trouble with Blind Dates

Hoooold on there Bobalouie!

1:00PM IS earlier than 12:59PM

There is nothing wrong there!

The WTF WTFer got WTF'ed?
The WTF is that some people still don't use the 24-hour clock.

This would assume that all people can count past 12. You may be assuming too much.

Sgt. Zim · 2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Anonymous:
Anonymous:
ParkinT:

Anonymous:

Must have been using the Date calculation from The Trouble with Blind Dates

Hoooold on there Bobalouie!

1:00PM IS earlier than 12:59PM

There is nothing wrong there!

The WTF WTFer got WTF'ed?
The WTF is that some people still don't use the 24-hour clock.

This would assume that all people can count past 12. You may be assuming too much.

"Damn my inadequate Base-10 fingers!!!1!eleven!!"

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Coughptcha:
DZ-Jay:

... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

"In case an unambiguous representation of time is required, 00:00 is usually the preferred notation for midnight and not 24:00."

24:00 yesterday is the same instant in time as 00:00 today ... but the standards don't go past 24:00. So a millisecond past that instant in time would not be 24:00:00.001 but rather 00:00:00.001.

Although that wouldn't stop me from writing an application which internally tracked time of, say, 26:00 to indicate 2am on the next day (e.g. when processing transactions actually associated with the previous day). I just wouldn't represent it that way externally.

But if you want to debate me, I'm 5 foot 14 inches tall.

Interestingly, Java's GregorianCalendar works this way - you can specify anti-normalized dates and it handles them correctly:

SimpleDateFormat sdf;
GregorianCalendar gc;
sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss");

// Specify the nonsensical: June 43, 2006 25:63:72
gc = new GregorianCalendar(2006,Calendar.JUNE,43, // yields Jul 13, 2006
                           25,63,72);             // + 25hr, 63 min, 72 sec
// This prints: 07/14/2006 02:04:12
System.out.println(sdf.format(gc.getTime()));

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Agreed. The buttons should say "Next" and "Previous," since they let you move through a list of photos.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

dcardani:
Anonymous:
The Kflickr dialog makes a lot more sense when icons are enabled on pushbuttons:

http://kflickr.sourceforge.net/wikka.php?wakka=Screen

No it doesn't. What's the difference between "OK (Down Arrow)", "OK," and "OK (Up Arrow)?" That's still confusing as hell.

Agreed. The buttons should say "Next" and "Previous," since they let you move through a list of photos.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

BradC:
Hehe, that's classic.

"You may want to find out why."

I'm going to start using that in all my error messages:

"Could not save file mystuff.txt. You may want to find out why."

"Email address is not in the correct format. You may want to find out why."

"MyProgram.exe encountered an error and could not continue. You may want to find out why, but you can't."

I'd love to see error messages like this. They would assume that I'm _not_ and idiot and can probably find the answer if I look. They are certainly better than some error messages I've seen that tell me a lot and say absolutly nothing.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

BradC:
Hehe, that's classic.

"You may want to find out why."

I'm going to start using that in all my error messages:

"Could not save file mystuff.txt. You may want to find out why."

"Email address is not in the correct format. You may want to find out why."

"MyProgram.exe encountered an error and could not continue. You may want to find out why, but you can't."

I'd love to see error messages like this. They would assume that I'm _not_ an idiot and can probably find the answer if I look. They are certainly better than some error messages I've seen that tell me a lot and say absolutly nothing.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Alex Papadimoulis:
[image]

FYI, this is Russian with the encoding messed up, which happens on systems without Cyrillic support. It goes: ? ?????????? ???? ???????? ????????? HP Share-to-Web ????? ??????? ? ??????????. ??????????? Translation: "As a result of this operation, HP Share-to-Web will be removed from this computer. Continue?". (Duh.)

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

I think the "Microsoft Office Picture Manager's compression algorithm" is not a WTF, as we all know that if the "data" is too complex, a compression algorithm could have "negative compression ratio".

Remembering at the days of PCX format, the "compressed size" can range to less than 1 percent of origional (best case) to over than 10 times(I don't remember where the limit is) of the origional size.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Coughptcha:
DZ-Jay:

... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

"In case an unambiguous representation of time is required, 00:00 is usually the preferred notation for midnight and not 24:00."

24:00 yesterday is the same instant in time as 00:00 today ... but the standards don't go past 24:00. So a millisecond past that instant in time would not be 24:00:00.001 but rather 00:00:00.001.

Although that wouldn't stop me from writing an application which internally tracked time of, say, 26:00 to indicate 2am on the next day (e.g. when processing transactions actually associated with the previous day). I just wouldn't represent it that way externally.

But if you want to debate me, I'm 5 foot 14 inches tall.

I do that too, which sometimes gets me into really-high-numbers, but that's a different story.

as for AM/PM wtf-iness, I used to 'work' with a group of people over the internet, now, most of these lived somewhere in north america, so whenever they had planned something, it was in some obscure timezone like PST, ET, EST or whatever they managed to think up, and the times were in 12 hour format (and 12 PM and AM happened often enough). Now try to think of the how this works with dates (considering I live in CET, GMT+1) and you'll know I found out the hard way how the AM/PM system is supposed to 'work'.

2006-06-02 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Interestingly, Java's GregorianCalendar works this way - you can specify anti-normalized dates and it handles them correctly:

I would argue the "correctly" there.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex Papadimoulis:
[image]

FYI, this is Russian with the encoding messed up, which happens on systems without Cyrillic support. It goes: ? ?????????? ???? ???????? ????????? HP Share-to-Web ????? ??????? ? ??????????. ??????????? Translation: "As a result of this operation, HP Share-to-Web will be removed from this computer. Continue?". (Duh.)

Ja, das ist good.

I'm very sorry, I couldn't resist.

EvanED · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I disagree.

The UI is fucked, there should be "save" button and a "close" button.
it's 2006 let's drop the ok'ing and cancel'ing.
And the window should be non-blocking so i could open multiple instances of the window on diffrent images. (offcourse not on the same image, because that would be stupid) (and also offcourse, for all i know it could already be so, but then there would be no use for the "ok, next img" button or "ok, previous img" button.

There certainly is reason for a next and prev button whether the dialog is modal or not. If you're going through all your images sequentially, either just to look at them or to edit them, you don't want to have to open the dialog for the first image, close it, then open it for the second image, etc. If the dialog isn't modal you could make it so that you could select all the images in the browser, then open the dialog for all of them, but that leaves you with a huge mess of windows. (Though IMO it's still better than being able to open one window at once and not having prev/next buttons.)

And going linearly through pictures is something that's done pretty often. Hence the support for doing so in MS's Picture and Fax Viewer, Canon's Zoom Browser, Google's Picasa, and probably most other similar software.

That said... I should have said before that they could definitely improve over the "OK" "OK" "OK" dialog box. If I were making just a change of text I'd go with "Prev", "Close", "Next", but I'd keep the up and down arrows. (There's probably some even better way to do it if you make a bigger change, but I can't think of anything now, at least within not killing usability like I feel removing those buttons would.)

Hawk777 · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
I think the "Microsoft Office Picture Manager's compression algorithm" is not a WTF, as we all know that if the "data" is too complex, a compression algorithm could have "negative compression ratio".

Remembering at the days of PCX format, the "compressed size" can range to less than 1 percent of origional (best case) to over than 10 times(I don't remember where the limit is) of the origional size.

Oh for crying out loud, why not just add a flag byte indicating compressed or not compressed? You can't make any sample of data you can possibly store in a file on disk 10 times bigger by adding one byte (unless it's empty to start with... in which case you could leave the result empty too, so the flag doesn't even exist, which signifies empty). Try compressing: if it gets bigger, store the original uncompressed version.

Otac0n · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
So is Tuesday, 24:00 midnight tuesday morning or midnight tuesday evening? If you're going to use that sort of annotation, might as well also say things like "Want to go to lunch Wednesday at 36:30?" 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 is clear. Anothing greater (or less) than that starts the confusion timescale...

Just use hours, minutes, and seconds like they are used in degrees. Tuesday + 23°59'59.9'

Tuesday at 24:00 is the same as Tuesday + 24°00'00" or the boundary between Tuesday and Wednesday.

Otac0n · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Hawk777:
Anonymous:
I think the "Microsoft Office Picture Manager's compression algorithm" is not a WTF, as we all know that if the "data" is too complex, a compression algorithm could have "negative compression ratio".

Remembering at the days of PCX format, the "compressed size" can range to less than 1 percent of origional (best case) to over than 10 times(I don't remember where the limit is) of the origional size.

Oh for crying out loud, why not just add a flag byte indicating compressed or not compressed? You can't make any sample of data you can possibly store in a file on disk 10 times bigger by adding one byte (unless it's empty to start with... in which case you could leave the result empty too, so the flag doesn't even exist, which signifies empty). Try compressing: if it gets bigger, store the original uncompressed version.

Yay for deflate for coming up with this.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

I found this one today in Vista beta 2:

[image]

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

The KFlickr screenshot is hilariously funny.

As a KDE developer I found the print system screenshot to be a bit sad, it is indeed terrible.

grep'ing through the KDE source code reveals no hits for this string. The dialogue itself looks a bit GNOMEish... hmm... Googling for '"You may want to find out why" gnome' suggests that the error comes from eggcups, which is part of GNOME. I think the WTF is how someone managed to combine parts of KDE and GNOME together to generate such an error.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

EvanED:

That said... I should have said before that they could definitely improve over the "OK" "OK" "OK" dialog box. If I were making just a change of text I'd go with "Prev", "Close", "Next", but I'd keep the up and down arrows. (There's probably some even better way to do it if you make a bigger change, but I can't think of anything now, at least within not killing usability like I feel removing those buttons would.)

My guess is that they're trying to make it obvious that "cancel" only cancels the changes for this photo, while "OK next" and "OK prev" save the changes before moving to the next image. Otherwise some people might think that "cancel" cancels all of the changes they've made for this dialog box.

As for sparse files, NTFS has supported them since 1995, but you didn't have much control over the allocation. You just turn on compression for a file and every large block that gets smaller when compressed will get stored as a small block or possibly not at all if the block is all zeros. In 2000 they added explicit support for sparse files, meaning you can add and remove blocks at will and easily discover which blocks are missing.

Keep in mind that the dialog box showing a 9PB file could have been from any filesystem, even FAT or CDFS. How? Well, the bits that got flipped might not have been flipped on disk. They could have been flipped in the remote server's memory, while being sent over the wire, or in the local client's memory.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Alex Papadimoulis:

[image]

I'm guessing this is an input locale bug, where the developers have hard-coded the input locale to something like French where . is a thousands separator and , is a decimal. So the software thought 0.500" was 500".

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
So is Tuesday, 24:00 midnight tuesday morning or midnight tuesday evening? If you're going to use that sort of annotation, might as well also say things like "Want to go to lunch Wednesday at 36:30?" 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 is clear. Anothing greater (or less) than that starts the confusion timescale...

Why? Wed 36:30 is Thu 12:30, easy as that. Likewise, the zeroth of the month is the last day of the previous month, and when doing the "what day-of-week is this or that date" dance, it's simply convenient to count "the 25th is a thursday, the 32nd is a thursday, and the 32nd is the 2nd (of the next month)" etc.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex Papadimoulis:
[image]

FYI, this is Russian with the encoding messed up, which happens on systems without Cyrillic support. It goes: ? ?????????? ???? ???????? ????????? HP Share-to-Web ????? ??????? ? ??????????. ??????????? Translation: "As a result of this operation, HP Share-to-Web will be removed from this computer. Continue?". (Duh.)

But how the hell did a Russian HP Share-to-Web end up on a Dutch Windows?

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

I think you guys are forgetting Leap seconds ;)

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

Hell, I just want that hard disk. What I could do with 8.5 petabytes...

You wouldn't like that... ;-)

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Maybe KFlickr is made by Leo Gets from lethal weapon?

moderator's note: advertising image removed

Then it would be "ok, ok, ok" (all of them).

dhromed · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Sgt. Zim:

"Damn my inadequate Base-10 fingers!!!1!eleven!!"

Tricked!

Anonymous:
Anonymous:
FYI, this is Russian with the encoding messed up, which happens on systems without Cyrillic support. It goes: ? ?????????? ???? ???????? ????????? HP Share-to-Web ????? ??????? ? ??????????. ??????????? Translation: "As a result of this operation, HP Share-to-Web will be removed from this computer. Continue?". (Duh.)

Ja, das ist good.

I'm very sorry, I couldn't resist.

Dutch. Not Deutsch.

You mean: "Ja, dat is goed."

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex Papadimoulis:

[image]

I'm guessing this is an input locale bug, where the developers have hard-coded the input locale to something like French where . is a thousands separator and , is a decimal. So the software thought 0.500" was 500".

No--note the dimension to reduce it to is stated in the same form. This is a floating point comparison bug.

Alexis de Torquemada · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Hawk777:
Oh for crying out loud, why not just add a flag byte indicating compressed or not compressed? ... Try compressing: if it gets bigger, store the original uncompressed version.

Furthermore, most of the compression algorithms in use today are smarter than the ancient PCX algorithm: They will never produce compressed data that is substantially larger than the input.

In defense of PCX, of course, its RLE (run-length encoding) approach could never more than double the image data compared to 8-bit indexed raw data. The only way to produce a 10 times or higher increase would be to use input data for which PCX wasn't designed, e.g. 1-bit black and white, together with very short average run lengths and a color mapping that utilizes the PCX high range even when low range colors (index numbers < 192) are still available.

So if a 1-bit picture containing a single pixel checkboard pattern is converted to PCX and the two colors are both mapped into the high range, we could obtain the maximum space increase of 1500% (not counting metadata). Which, of course, would be a totally theoretical exercise.

makomk · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Alex Papadimoulis:
[image]

FYI, this is Russian with the encoding messed up, which happens on systems without Cyrillic support. It goes: ? ?????????? ???? ???????? ????????? HP Share-to-Web ????? ??????? ? ??????????. ??????????? Translation: "As a result of this operation, HP Share-to-Web will be removed from this computer. Continue?". (Duh.)

Apparently, the Russians even have a word for this: ???????´???.

Edit: Oh, and HP have always been a bit locale-challenged. I remember the driver installer for my HP 840C kept coming up in a foreign language for no good reason at one point (I think I mentioned it before).

makomk · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

DZ-Jay:
marvin_rabbit:
nsimeonov:
24:00 is actually invalid so there are no ambiguities at all. 24h clock goes from 00:00 to 23:59

And just to head off anyone that tries to make the argument (if anyone were to try to do so) , 24:00 still isn't valid even when a Leap Second is declared. In that case the clock goes from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 to 00:00:00.

(Just wanting to throw out trivia.)

OK, I'll bite. First, a link to the Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Midnight_00:00_and_24:00

I only offer that to make it easier for anybody to find and read it, as I don't trust Wikipedia, so here's another resource with the same:

    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Now, how about a more "official" page, say, an IBM reference on locales:

    http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/locales/date_time.jsp

Here's a brief excerpt from that page:

In the ISO/IEC twenty-four-hour system, 24:00 is midnight at the end of a day, and 00:01 is one minute after midnight of the next day. The sequence is 23:59, 24:00, 00:01. In ISO/IEC standard 8601, both 24:00 and 00:00 are allowed to indicate midnight, with 24:00 indicating the end of the day and 00:00 indicating the start of the next day.
(emphasis mine.)

Did you even look it up, or did you just *thought* that it was invalid, and therefore assumed it must be so?

     -dZ.

On the other hand, all devices - computers, alarm clocks, etc - that need to choose a 24-hour clock representation for midnight seem to ignore the standard and choose the (more sensible IMAO) 00:00; 24:00 seems to be relatively unusual.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

makomk:
On the other hand, all devices - computers, alarm clocks, etc - that need to choose a 24-hour clock representation for midnight seem to ignore the standard and choose the (more sensible IMAO) 00:00; 24:00 seems to be relatively unusual.

Both are correct behaviours, actually. The standard says that 2006-06-03 24:00 and 2006-06-04 00:00 denote the same point in time, so either of them can be used. I agree 00:00 is more familiar, though.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

These would be more amusing if most of them weren't fake. Come on, we all know screenshots are fairly trivial to edit in your favorite graphics editor.

ammoQ · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
These would be more amusing if most of them weren't fake. Come on, we all know screenshots are fairly trivial to edit in your favorite graphics editor.

It's also relatively easy to write a few lines of bad code and make up a story about a stupid coworker or a failed outsourcing project. How can we know anything on this site is real? Well, most of us work in IT and we have seen such WTFs before and I'm afraid we will see them again and again. The same can be said about the screenshots: I believe every single one of them because I've seen Windows saying "can't delete file, not enough disk space" with my own eyes.

2006-06-03 Reply Admin

And I always thought that adding a bunch of zeros to the right of a decimal point made a number bigger (you know, cause it weighs more) -- but according to this pop-up from Nathan Nottingham, I guess I was wrong ...

This one is not so stupid. As 0.500 could be any truncated value between 0.500 and 0.501. I guess the value was 0.500-something and the software truncated it (why'o why ?) to print.
Well, okay this is lame but it could be a nearly rational explanation...

EvanED · 2006-06-03 Reply Admin

Alex Papadimoulis:
I thought you audiophiles were crazy with your 768kbit/s MP3s ... but 400 Tbit/s? Now that's just ridiculous ...

[image]

I'll say this for MS. They certainly seem to have gotten past their '640K is enough for anyone' mentality...

2006-06-04 Reply Admin

makomk:
Apparently, the Russians even have a word for this: ???????´???.

Funny, "krakozyabry" is an expressive term along the lines of "abracadabra" and "mumbojumbo"; I live abroad and I didn't know it had made its way into "official" internet slang.

snailwalker · 2006-06-04 Reply Admin

Well I once installed Panda Antivirus and Firewall on my computer, and suddenly was my internet broken. First I thought it was a problem with the lan connection, until I got this dialog box :)

lan connection dialogbox

It's from the Danish edition of Windows but look at the number of packages (Pakker) which has been sent (Sendt) :O

2006-06-04 Reply Admin

But creates a new one: 00:00 = 24:00? ans: No.

Regards

2006-06-04 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
The KFlickr screenshot is hilariously funny.
As a KDE developer I found the print system screenshot to be a bit sad, it is indeed terrible.

grep'ing through the KDE source code reveals no hits for this string. The dialogue itself looks a bit GNOMEish... hmm... Googling for '"You may want to find out why" gnome' suggests that the error comes from eggcups, which is part of GNOME. I think the WTF is how someone managed to combine parts of KDE and GNOME together to generate such an error.

GNOME. Printing. Why aren't I surprised?

CAPTCHA: captcha

2006-06-05 Reply Admin

surprise!

there are people using the internet that speak languages other than english... really!

2006-06-05 Reply Admin

Alex Papadimoulis:

[image]

Would sir be liking some poppadums and Cobra beer while he is waiting?

2006-06-05 Reply Admin

OtherMichael:
Ambiguity at noon and midnight

The actual meaning of the terms ante meridiem (before noon) and post meridiem (after noon) are obviously not applicable at exactly noon or midnight.

However, it has become common practice in countries that use the system (such as the United States) to designate noon as 12:00 p.m and midnight as 12:00 a.m. The practical advantage of this convention becomes clear when one considers a digital clock . Noon and midnight are only infinitesimal points in time, and therefore it is not practical to use any other convention than that which also applies immediately afterwards, when the clock still displays 12:00. This convention is standardized for computer usage in American National Standard ANSI INCITS 310 (which extends the international standard ISO 8601 time notation with a 12-h a.m./p.m. variant for the U.S.-market).

Many U.S. style guides (including the NIST website) recommend instead that it is clearest if one refers to "noon" or "12:00 noon" and "midnight" or "12:00 midnight" (rather than to 12:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., respectively). Some other style guides suggest "12:00 n" for noon and "12:00 m" for midnight, but this conflicts with the older tradition of using "12:00 m" for noon (Latin meridies), and "12:00 mn" for midnight (media nox).

Even with all these conventions, references to midnight remain problematic, because they do not distinguish between the midnight at the start of the day referenced and the midnight at its end. Therefore, some U.S. style guides recommend to either provide other context clues, or to avoid references to midnight entirely, for example in favour of 11:59 p.m. for the end of the day and 00:01 a.m. for the start of the day. The latter has become common practice in the United States in legal contracts and for airplane, bus, or train schedules.

The 24-hour clock notation avoids all of these ambiguities by using 00:00, 12:00, and 24:00.

Thanks for that mate, but I've worked at a place that uses this complete 'off the shelf' problem resolution management software. If you got an error message like that, you would have to wait about 2 minutes, press OK again and get the result you were after. Trust me, the application does honestly believe the afternoon has already happened - GET ON WITH YOUR WORK.

Please, someone from a company that has outsourced its infrastructure to this international company of business work machines, post the screenshot of the tab containing field 1, field 2, field 3 etc....from the same application.

2006-06-05 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
The Kflickr dialog makes a lot more sense when icons are enabled on pushbuttons:

http://kflickr.sourceforge.net/wikka.php?wakka=Screen

No they do not.

Pop-up Potpourri: June Bugs

Ambiguity at noon and midnight

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