• (cs)

    These never get old :)

  • uep (unregistered)

    The unused button is just classic.

    I want one.

  • (cs)

    Cool - lots of 'Danger, Will Robinson!' stuff this week - I have always felt that way about Uncle Bill...

  • Anita Tinkle (unregistered) in reply to Cooper

    I agree.  Microsoft is full of violence, hate and racism.

  • U. N. Owen (unregistered)

    Longhorn is a racial ephitet, unless I'm mistaken.  You'd think they'd be more careful than to choose something racist, let alone to blame it on the Linux users.

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    So Michael Wood understands that he has to restart ... but just doesn't get how he's supposed to do it ...

    [image]

    It is good to see that Windows now does not require so many restarts when installing software.

    That'll show David Koontz for going and buying a fancy-schmancy new computermagig ...

    [image]



    "1201"<"233".  Comparing numbers as strings strikes again.

    "Boss, I need a machine with at least a 3 GHz clock speed for this program."

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

  • (cs) in reply to uep
    Anonymous:
    The unused button is just classic.


    And you notice it's just above the Extra Settings.
  • (cs) in reply to Anita Tinkle
    Anonymous:
    I agree.  Microsoft is full of violence, hate and racism.



    I particularly like how there is an option to bookmark the banned site.
  • gwfc (unregistered)

    2,023,406,814 hours / 24 hours per day / 365 days per year = 230,982 years.  Not 2.3 million.

    So that's like, much better I guess.

    Sincerely,

    gwfc

  • SusanK (unregistered)

    I thought maybe the bullitens might have tripped the blocke


    [image]

  • me (unregistered) in reply to Sean

    I think I send this one to Alex once, but it didn't make into Pop-up Potpourris... Anyway:[image]

  • (cs)

    Maybe it's because the CPU is IDT and the software is unable to determine which x86 family it's compatible with. (I'm guessing i686).

  • nn (unregistered)



    Just before reaching the End of the Internet, Bart B found the file "everything.sit", which apparently contained all knowledge in the universe. Fortunately, StuffIt let's you play solitare while it takes the next 2.3 million years to expand the file ...

    [image]





    Hmm I get 230.000 years from this... a lot less, so it's not that bad :P

  • (cs) in reply to nn
    Anonymous:


    Just before reaching the End of the Internet, Bart B found the file "everything.sit", which apparently contained all knowledge in the universe. Fortunately, StuffIt let's you play solitare while it takes the next 2.3 million years to expand the file ...

    [image]





    Hmm I get 230.000 years from this... a lot less, so it's not that bad :P

    So do I. I guess Alex mis-read the location of the decimal point.

  • (cs) in reply to don
    don:
    Anonymous:
    The unused button is just classic.


    And you notice it's just above the Extra Settings.

    A while after I noticed the button made it into production, I told a co-worker that the new version of the application would not have that button (jokingly) due to time constraints...and he didn't know what button I was talking about. This guy uses the system on an almost daily basis and never saw it. It tripped me out. Then, his next question: "What does it do?" Doh! I am including a "Do not click this button" button, but that, being intentional, would not make good potpourri.

  • (cs) in reply to jspenguin

    jspenguin:
    Maybe it's because the CPU is IDT and the software is unable to determine which x86 family it's compatible with. (I'm guessing i686).

    The WTF there is not so much that the installer mis-recognizes the CPU, but that the installer requires a particular speed at all. Let the user figure that out herself.

  • diaphanein (unregistered) in reply to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over.

    Personally, I love the "Never!"  Its beautiful in its simplicitly.  Presumably, its an error message offering nothing at all in the way of help to the [L]user.  As a developer who was thrust into maintaining a crappy GUI, I'm seriously considering of replacing all of my errors with this. [:P]

  • (cs) in reply to nn
    Anonymous:


    Just before reaching the End of the Internet, Bart B found the file "everything.sit", which apparently contained all knowledge in the universe. Fortunately, StuffIt let's you play solitare while it takes the next 2.3 million years to expand the file ...

    [image]





    Hmm I get 230.000 years from this... a lot less, so it's not that bad :P



    I was about to correct you and tell you it was actually 230,000.  Then I realized you're one of those crazy non-americans who mix up the decimal place and commas.[;)]
  • (cs) in reply to Anita Tinkle
    Anonymous:
    I agree.  Microsoft is full of violence, hate and racism.



    Ironically, I once worked at a Windows shop that blocked out apache.org
  • (cs) in reply to U. N. Owen
    Anonymous:
    Longhorn is a racial ephitet, unless I'm mistaken.  You'd think they'd be more careful than to choose something racist, let alone to blame it on the Linux users.


    It's only a racial epithet since January, when UT won the Rose Bowl.
  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    That'll show David Koontz for going and buying a fancy-schmancy new computermagig ...

    [image]

    I love the "Retry" button. That implies that it could have incorrectly detected the CPU, or that you can change the CPU while the program is open.

  • (cs)

    I just yearn for the day that we can get people to STOP saving screen snapshots like this to JPEG's.  That's about the worst choice to make.  (Well, at least way down on the list.)

    GIF, TIFF (compressed), PNG.  Any of these would be MUCH better.

    (And 'No', I'm not saying that jpeg's don't have a place.  They are great for photos or anything with lots of color gradients.  But not so great for a screen snapshot of text boxes.)

  • (cs) in reply to marvin_rabbit
    marvin_rabbit:
    I just yearn for the day that we can get people to STOP saving screen snapshots like this to JPEG's.  That's about the worst choice to make.  (Well, at least way down on the list.)

    GIF, TIFF (compressed), PNG.  Any of these would be MUCH better.

    (And 'No', I'm not saying that jpeg's don't have a place.  They are great for photos or anything with lots of color gradients.  But not so great for a screen snapshot of text boxes.)

    Well I gotta admit, I guess we're doing a better job than I thought!  It was just the big 'SonicWALL' and 'Live Mail' that really caught my eye.
  • fsd (unregistered) in reply to marvin_rabbit

    LOL

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    That'll show David Koontz for going and buying a fancy-schmancy new computermagig ...

    [image]

    That reminds me... I really ought to install the drivers and software for my HP all-in-one device (PSC1410). I'm not particularly keen on the idea because the last few times I tried it, it failed in various weird (but sadly not that DailyWTF-worthy) ways and I'm not sure why. (Hopefully, now I've moved from 98 to XP it'll work better - right? Right?) Fortunately, I do most of my printing from Linux anyway, and HP's Linux drivers for it are actually reasonably good, by some miracle.

    Actually, I think the installer I used might have had this bug but allowed me to continue anyway (are they making progress?).

  • (cs) in reply to SerajewelKS
    SerajewelKS:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    That'll show David Koontz for going and buying a fancy-schmancy new computermagig ...

    I love the "Retry" button. That implies that it could have incorrectly detected the CPU, or that you can change the CPU while the program is open.

    Ughh.  I can't even believe that I'm gonna say this: "Well that's not so much a WTF."

    But the 'system requirements' probably encompasses things like free disk space as well.  And this could change while the install program is running.

  • Urzumph (unregistered)

    If boing boing can get blocked for nudity then it doesn't surprise me at all that MS gets blocked for hate / violence

  • (cs) in reply to Gene Wirchenko
    Gene Wirchenko:

    "1201"<"233".  Comparing numbers as strings strikes again.

    "Boss, I need a machine with at least a 3 GHz clock speed for this program."

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

    I suppose it could be something else WTF-worthy. Looking at the bottom of the message, they could be comparing the detected CPU manufacturer to a list of known ones and failing because it doesn't match. Anyone got the rest of the error text?

  • (cs) in reply to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over.

    Just before reaching the End of the Internet, Bart B found the file "everything.sit", which apparently contained all knowledge in the universe. Fortunately, StuffIt let's you play solitare while it takes the next 2.3 million years to expand the file ...

    [image]

    I get it, so the WTF is that you get ~230,982 years, not 2.3 million years

  • (cs) in reply to makomk
    makomk:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    That'll show David Koontz for going and buying a fancy-schmancy new computermagig ...

    [image]

    That reminds me... I really ought to install the drivers and software for my HP all-in-one device (PSC1410). I'm not particularly keen on the idea because the last few times I tried it, it failed in various weird (but sadly not that DailyWTF-worthy) ways and I'm not sure why. (Hopefully, now I've moved from 98 to XP it'll work better - right? Right?) Fortunately, I do most of my printing from Linux anyway, and HP's Linux drivers for it are actually reasonably good, by some miracle.

    Actually, I think the installer I used might have had this bug but allowed me to continue anyway (are they making progress?).


    HP's all in one installer is the greatest travesty on earth. You have to pray nightly and shake the voodoo chicken over it 4 times just to get it to work on the initial install. If you ever have to reinstall for any reason, or if you plugged it in before the installer told you to, it's an almost guaranteed failure. 350 megs of download just so it can hang while "detecting USB device". But I'm sure something as silly as that would never contribute to a dozen consecutive quarters of lower profits and universal loss of goodwill toward the company.
    makomk:
    Gene Wirchenko:

    "1201"<"233".  Comparing numbers as strings strikes again.

    "Boss, I need a machine with at least a 3 GHz clock speed for this program."

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

    I suppose it could be something else WTF-worthy. Looking at the bottom of the message, they could be comparing the detected CPU manufacturer to a list of known ones and failing because it doesn't match. Anyone got the rest of the error text?

    No, it really is just a string compare. It took them months to roll out a fix online too, and they won't send you updated disks if you call and ask.

  • (cs) in reply to foxyshadis

    Interesting that the WTF for the third item (ows Live Mail Beta) is not in fact in the Beta software which is quite properly flagging a message which has been incorrectly formulated, but that the Beta Team listserv doesn't conform to standards.  Although, considering the fact that is MS, it's not so much a WTF as unsurprising.

  • (cs) in reply to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over.
    WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver:

    jspenguin:
    Maybe it's because the CPU is IDT and the software is unable to determine which x86 family it's compatible with. (I'm guessing i686).

    The WTF there is not so much that the installer mis-recognizes the CPU, but that the installer requires a particular speed at all. Let the user figure that out herself.




    Plus, when did CPU speed ever matter for a damn *printer driver* ?
  • (cs) in reply to reed
    reed:
    WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver:
    ...
    ...


    Bug report to Alex, this forum software complained about a mismatched quote tag until I changed user="Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over." to user="WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver".


  • JonathanThompson (unregistered) in reply to reed
    reed:
    WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver:

    jspenguin:
    Maybe it's because the CPU is IDT and the software is unable to determine which x86 family it's compatible with. (I'm guessing i686).

    The WTF there is not so much that the installer mis-recognizes the CPU, but that the installer requires a particular speed at all. Let the user figure that out herself.




    Plus, when did CPU speed ever matter for a damn *printer driver* ?

    In practice, you'd sincerely hope it wouldn't matter.  Where it *could* be a problem, though, is if for some dumb reason you were using a laser printer with too small of a buffer to hold the entire page bitmap in, so a buffer underrun would result in garbage output.  I'm sincerely hoping no printer with such a constraint exists in the wild, though [:(]

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to nn

    what i find intriguing is everything.sit is blurred in the screenshot.  i have a feeling it is PhotoshopCS2.sit or something similar

  • (cs) in reply to foxyshadis
    foxyshadis:
    HP's all in one installer is the greatest travesty on earth. You have to pray nightly and shake the voodoo chicken over it 4 times just to get it to work on the initial install. If you ever have to reinstall for any reason, or if you plugged it in before the installer told you to, it's an almost guaranteed failure. 350 megs of download just so it can hang while "detecting USB device". But I'm sure something as silly as that would never contribute to a dozen consecutive quarters of lower profits and universal loss of goodwill toward the company.

    To be honest, I chose HP over the other manufacturers for the Linux support, which is relatively lean (just the driver and two daemons - the Windows software has at least 3 of the damn things, and they crash every so often), and almost always works (I haven't had any real problems yet). Of course, they don't actually say they have Linux drivers on the box, or provide them on the CD - you have to find them yourself. 

  • (cs) in reply to makomk

    That reminds me - when I was reinstalling the drivers for the Deskjet 840C I was using at the time so that I could use use USB (I had it set up using a parallel cable, and switching required a full driver reinstall), the installer kept coming up in a foreign language for no apparent reason. (Unfortunately I have no screenshots.) The only way I could get it to come up in English was to create an English-only set of driver disks and install from those. WTF? 

  • (cs)

    (Dialog) "To dowload this content for MSN Messenger, click Install."

    (User, to self) "That sounds about right. I usually click Install when I want to install things. I'll just tell it that's what i figured I should do..."
    /clicks OK

    (Dialog) "So, when the Install button appears, you should click it. But only if you want to download and install this content. Okay?"

    (User, to self) "This must be part of that Trustworthy Computing thing that was on the news last week...."
    /clicks OK again

    (Dialog) "Just so we're square on this whole deal. Can't afford any misunderstandings now...."
    .
    .
    .

  • Lyle (unregistered)

    [image]

    Could this one be the property of adblocking software removing the rest of the page contents?

  • Werewolf (unregistered)

    I noticed in the one about microsoft.com, you spelled it "microsft"; later on, you spell Windows XP "Wndows XP."  What's this?  Can you not write the true name of your lord (as some orthodox Jews write "G-d" rather than writing the true name of God)?

  • (cs)

    On a completely different note regarding the StuffIt dialog box: 2023406814 = 0x789abcde. Nice placeholder value, isn't it?

  • (cs) in reply to codeman38
    codeman38:
    On a completely different note regarding the StuffIt dialog box: 2023406814 = 0x789abcde. Nice placeholder value, isn't it?

    I think he's got it. Explains a lot (like the fact that, if the progress bar is accurate, it appears to have been running for the past 250 thousand years or so - which is even more of a WTF than the time remaining, IMO...)

  • (cs) in reply to reed

    I bought World of Warcraft a couple weeks ago, and at the first step of the installation I was told that my processor wasn't good enough. I don't recall what the minimum requirement was stated as, I think it was like 1.2 GHz. It compared it to the 2.13 GHz Pentium-M on my laptop and said I wouldn't be able to play it.

    WTF #1: That's not a string compare issue on the numbers, I'm guessing they didn't have that model of processor in their database even though it's been in wide circulation for months

    WTF #2: Allowing me to install the game on a computer that doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they let me, but if their installer was better then it shouldn't waste 2 hours of the user's time to install a 5-GB program that he ultimately can't use.

    Oh and reed...

    reed:
    reed:
    WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver:
    ...
    ...


    Bug report to Alex, this forum software complained about a mismatched quote tag until I changed user="Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over." to user="WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver".


    This is because there was a question mark in WTFO's name. The spaces are OK, punctuation is not. I fought with this a couple times one day before I figured it out. Allow a user to have characters in their name that prevents people from quoting them. I think I heard someone say once that the forum software was a WTF on its own. I can't remember who that was...

  • David Merrell (unregistered)

    This is what Powerdvd does if you try to play a dvd, but do not have a dvd drive:

    [image]

  • (cs) in reply to Manni
    Manni:

    I bought World of Warcraft a couple weeks ago, and at the first step of the installation I was told that my processor wasn't good enough. I don't recall what the minimum requirement was stated as, I think it was like 1.2 GHz. It compared it to the 2.13 GHz Pentium-M on my laptop and said I wouldn't be able to play it.

    WTF #1: That's not a string compare issue on the numbers, I'm guessing they didn't have that model of processor in their database even though it's been in wide circulation for months

    WTF #2: Allowing me to install the game on a computer that doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they let me, but if their installer was better then it shouldn't waste 2 hours of the user's time to install a 5-GB program that he ultimately can't use.

    Actually, letting you install anyway sounds like a sensible precaution - it means that, if the user thinks the software has got it wrong (or just wants to give it a shot anyway), they can do so. (And software does seem to get this wrong rather more frequently than you'd hope.)

    Manni:
    I think I heard someone say once that the forum software was a WTF on its own. I can't remember who that was...

    Pretty much everyone who's used it for any length of time, I think.

  • An apprentice (unregistered) in reply to diaphanein
    Anonymous:
    Personally, I love the "Never!"  Its beautiful in its simplicitly.  Presumably, its an error message offering nothing at all in the way of help to the [L]user.  As a developer who was thrust into maintaining a crappy GUI, I'm seriously considering of replacing all of my errors with this. [:P]

    Just another 'Unthinkable mayhem' or 'This cannot happen' condition handled gracefully.

  • N&#246;rgler (unregistered) in reply to reed
    reed:
    reed:
    WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver:
    ...
    ...


    Bug report to Alex, this forum software complained about a mismatched quote tag until I changed user="Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Over." to user="WhiskeyTangoFoxtrotOver".


    The forum software is the allday WTF here <:o)

  • (cs) in reply to Manni
    Manni:

    I think I heard someone say once that the forum software was a WTF on its own. I can't remember who that was...



    I think that was everyone...
  • (cs) in reply to Manni
    Manni:

    WTF #2: Allowing me to install the game on a computer that doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they let me, but if their installer was better then it shouldn't waste 2 hours of the user's time to install a 5-GB program that he ultimately can't use.

    I was about to say the exact opposite. I've run in to a lot of shitty installers that will block a program from even being installed, even though it clearly meets the requirements. Like Doom 3. Yeah, I wanted to run it on Windows 2003 Server. I know it wasn't a great choice for gaming, but for hell's sake, let me at least try. In the end, I did get it to run, and it ran just fine (and you'll all be happy to know I'm back on XP now).

    The point is, that's fine if you warn the user, but at least provide a way to get around it. If you want to make it not obvious, give me a flag I can use when I run the damn thing. Don't just say no.

  • (cs) in reply to Manni
    Manni:
    ...I think I heard someone say once that the forum software was a WTF on its own. I can't remember who that was...
    <font size="5">I</font> think every one of us has made that statement at least once.

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