• (cs) in reply to KattMan
    Anonymous:
    The Vicar:
    Anonymous:

    Fuzzy only in the sense that the number was picked up off the floor after being found by sweeping under the refridgerator in a colledge dorm room.

    I mean seriously, when there are only 3 results total, how can 653 be at all calculated?  Note that the page went out, they know they have 10 pages so use that as a basis.

    Now I know the number of pages is fuzzy, I've seen examples where I have links for 1-10 pages and by moving through using the next arrow you get to page 6 and suddenly there are only 6 pages.  Or perhaps this is also fuzzy like something pulled out of a sweaty jocks belly button first thing in the morning.

    I remember reading somewhere that Google only shows what it considers relevant results, in an attempt to get rid of pages that just stack together words at random to pull you into a porn site (and other dirty tricks). It wouldn't surprise me to find that there really were 600-odd pages that used that combination of words somewhere and that those pages were excluded. Google does not make any claims ANYWHERE about transparency.

    Yes but read my post way up top, it showed 1-2 of 653 with a message stating exactly what you claim and a link to view all those excluded links.  Clicking that gave me 1-3 of 653.  I would have expected either a more accurate count or all 653 of those links.

    Nope, that's just eliminating duplicates. Eliminating things that are presumed to be irrelevant is different. (By a factor, apparently, of about 600.)
  • Marcel (unregistered) in reply to Alexis de Torquemada
    Alexis de Torquemada:
    Ok, this one's nice. Reminds me of a funny split-flap display at the main station in Stuttgart, Germany. It displayed about one in ten letters incorrectly, usually it's off by one. Once that I looked at it, it displayed "REGIOMALEXORERS" instead of "REGIONALEXPRESS". That's three errors in sixteen letters. The destination was incorrect, too, of course, something like "MEMMINFEN" instead of "MEMMINGEN", though I don't remember that part. I just hope the train times display is more accurate.
    Not sure about that, but those old beasts have been sent to retirement anyway. It's all stylish "white on blue" (LC?)Displays now. I guess these are much better in showing the DOS prompt during a crash, too!
  • Anthony Chaffey (unregistered) in reply to jesirose

    Actually, I don't think this is a PDA. I think it is a smartphone, as if it was a PDA/Pocket PC, the very top right corner would be an "OK" or "X" button. Anyway, that's not important!

    It's not exactly a WTF but not great communication from the author either to be fair. It should technically say that the radio is turned off, but then that in itself could get confusing! So I can see the problem he faced!

    Captcha: captcha (would you beleive it)

  • risk (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo
    Carnildo:
    Anonymous:

    I like the start and finish labels on the progress bar. That really clears things up.
    It's known as "being user-friendly". Someone whose native writing system is right-to-left would naturally expect the progress bar to go the other direction, so the labels are there to keep people from getting confused.


    I admit I hadn't thought of that, but I'm still not convinced. You start the process with a white bar that slowly turns blue bit by bit as you progress. It doesn't matter which way the bar progresses, you get the idea anyway. And then there are the colors. The white is the background of the frame which will make anyone conclude that the other color is the foreground and thus represents the progress. Besides, blue progress bars have been convention for at least ten years.

    Also l ooking at the rest of the image, I doubt if user-friendliness is high on their list of priorities.


  • (cs) in reply to The Vicar

    I think that 653 was computed as:

    internet.size()*ppb(word[0])*ppb(word[1])*ppb(word[2])...

    which probably is the only sane way to estimate the size of sets' intersection (and less sane for exact phrase), except for ... actually counting them when there are less then $_REQUEST['num'] of them displayed.

    If you play a bit you can even find examples of words A and B such that google claims that 

    "A B"
    is more popular than 
    A B

    the logic behind that is complex (some stopwords are not counted, some are, but only in phrases, some pairs of words are counted more precisely than just estimating the intersection)

    ...but still, if the output has 3 items why do they still claim there is more?

  • (cs)

    Regarding August 0, some 15 years ago, the French tax department was suffering a huge backlog, and in order to finish their paperwork in time, straight out of a Marcel Aymé story, they decided to add 4 days to the month of December, so some files were stamped December 32, 33, 23 and 35…

    [image]

  • (cs)
    Anonymous:

    It makes me remind the error that I got a few days ago while installing Windows 98 in an old PC...

    Look at the buttons "minimize", "maximize" and "close" and the scrollbar... all that were numbers :P

    That's because Windows used to use a specific font for all those things. If the font cache gets screwed up, those buttons all get whacked out too. Can't remember off the top of my head what it was called though.

  • (cs) in reply to Pig.Hogger

    Pig.Hogger:
    Regarding August 0, some 15 years ago, the French tax department was suffering a huge backlog, and in order to finish their paperwork in time, straight out of a Marcel Aymé story, they decided to add 4 days to the month of December, so some files were stamped December 32, 33, 23 and 35…

    Reminds me of back in 1999 when there were some concerns about getting all the Y2k work done in time. I proposed we make the next year Year 0. I mean, it had never been used before. What were we saving it for? We get an extra year to finish coding and testing, and we can finally eliminate once and for all those annoying arguments of "well, technically, the century does not begin until '01."

    --Rank

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    So, black box installs [image] as a component?

    I'd hate to see what their class names would be if they were doing OO programming.

  • em (unregistered)

    The question intended is "Are you Hispanic or Latino?", and if you are, they also want to know if you're among the top three Hispanic groups in the USA, and which. "Yes, other" means that you're Hispanic, but from one of the less frequent groups.

  • (cs) in reply to Anthony Chaffey
    Anonymous:
    Actually, I don't think this is a PDA. I think it is a smartphone, as if it was a PDA/Pocket PC, the very top right corner would be an "OK" or "X" button. Anyway, that's not important!



    Err... you do know many PDAs run on something else than PocketPC, right? Not important, indeed, but I happen to have one of those...
  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    Enric Naval discovered, quite possibly, the longest variable name ever ...

    [image]

    Whoa. Ruby on Rails AJAX error (guessing based on the fact that it's on a 37signals app). I was wondering when we'd start seeing these. =)

  • anon (unregistered)

    Suppose you where on a plane? or at a gas station? or on a site using blasting caps? or in a hospital? There are plenty of places you aren't allowed to use a mobile phoen for safety reasons, but might need access to your PDA. More usefully, the PDA could ask "you currently have the phone turned off. Would you like to turn it on?"

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered) in reply to Carnildo

    Carnildo:
    It's known as "being user-friendly". Someone whose native writing system is right-to-left would naturally expect the progress bar to go the other direction, so the labels are there to keep people from getting confused.

    Definitely.  Breaking such habits is far harder than learning a new language.  The day I met the woman that's now my wife she knew one word of English.  That was 20 years ago--we communicate fine now, but she still calls the thing on the right the first one.

  • Dunkelstern (unregistered)

    That's indeed a wtf ;)

    captcha: billgates (no, not this time)

  • Olddog (unregistered) in reply to em

    Anonymous:
    The question intended is "Are you Hispanic or Latino?", and if you are, they also want to know if you're among the top three Hispanic groups in the USA, and which. "Yes, other" means that you're Hispanic, but from one of the less frequent groups.

    Looks to me the demographic split is geographic not lingual.  The implied demographic is "Are you Hispanic or Latino?" *and* (English literate) *and* (from Cuba,Mexico,Puerto Rico or not). The "No" choice is just to confuse and frustrate the non-Hispanic/Latino English literate demographic that is not from Cuba,Mexico or Puerto Rico, or otherwise elsewhere. -- At the very end of the survey no less.

    This is an excellent example of logically blustering the un-wanted candidate.

  • Jon (unregistered) in reply to tin
    tin:
    Anonymous:

    It makes me remind the error that I got a few days ago while installing Windows 98 in an old PC...

    Look at the buttons "minimize", "maximize" and "close" and the scrollbar... all that were numbers :P

    That's because Windows used to use a specific font for all those things. If the font cache gets screwed up, those buttons all get whacked out too. Can't remember off the top of my head what it was called though.

    It's called Marlett, and the minimise, maximise, restore and close icons are indeed the symbols for 0, 1, 2 and r respectively.
  • (cs) in reply to Olddog
    Anonymous:

    Looks to me the demographic split is geographic not lingual.  The implied demographic is "Are you Hispanic or Latino?" *and* (English literate) *and* (from Cuba,Mexico,Puerto Rico or not). The "No" choice is just to confuse and frustrate the non-Hispanic/Latino English literate demographic that is not from Cuba,Mexico or Puerto Rico, or otherwise elsewhere. -- At the very end of the survey no less.

    This is an excellent example of logically blustering the un-wanted candidate.

    A wise man once said, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

    It's just too easy to believe that the page author had a simple brain fart.  He/she was probably thinking about the typical survey question about race or ethnicity, which always looks like:  "Are you:  <> Human  <> Klingon  <> Ferengi" and subconsciously typed what was running through his/her brain at that moment.

    As is so often the case with WTFs, the WTF is that it didn't go past QA, or any second set of eyes at all.
     

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    I suppose it's for the better that Octoshape errored out on Michael Hirsh. They may seem primitive, but the natives -- they're peaceful, really!

    [image]


    Leave the natives alone!



  • (cs)
    Anonymous:

    Whats wrong with loading an entire file into a variable?

    In C, when working with text files (INI's, XML, config files of any sort) it is a lot faster to read the whole text file into memory, then work on the copy in RAM, than it is to constantly read small amounts of text from disc.

     In fact, John Carmack has a collection of functions which duplicate the functionality of C's fopen/fread/etc functions that work on files from memory instead of disk - its used in all ID's games... Check out the source for yourself.
     

    Excatly. The Real WTF(tm) is that someone thinks he can judge whether or not a programming practice is good or not without knowing the context. 

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    I suppose it's for the better that Octoshape errored out on Michael Hirsh. They may seem primitive, but the natives -- they're peaceful, really!

    [image]

    But they seem to be very good at hiding and camouflaging, those natives.  I suppose it's for the better...

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Time sure flew by for Ian; he had no idea his website has been that long ...

    [image]

    Dec. 31, 1969 wouldn't be (time_t)(-1), by any chance?

  • Anthony Chaffey (unregistered) in reply to felix

    Yes of course I do...trust me, I am not a narrow minded Microsoft fan!

    But my point still stands, it's a Smartphone running Windows Mobile not a PDA/Pocket PC/Palm/Symbian/whatever the hell you want to call it...

  • (cs) in reply to GeekMessage

    GeekMessage:
    Dec. 31, 1969 wouldn't be (time_t)(-1), by any chance?

    Heh, you beat me to it. I just thought that maybe they store a negative number (e.g. -1) in their database in case the page wasn't indexed before (a WTF in itself if they're using an RDBMS because that's what NULL was invented for). The indexing summary report doesn't check for this magic number and just converts it to a date by interpreting it as time_t (for the Unix-illiterate: number of seconds since the start of the Unix epoch). Another WTF if they're using an RDBMS because that's what the DATE type is for.

     Anyway, this would nicely explain what went wrong here.

     

  • (cs)

    I've always been simultaneously annoyed and amused by this message that I get regularly from MS Dev Studio (2003).  It occurs when you select a project in a solution, set it to your startup project, and try to right-click on it to get the property pages.  DevStudio gratuitously changes your selected project/file in the Solution Explorer during the process of popping up the property page selector, and by the time the popup appears, it thinks it is looking at a file instead of a project.  So you get this:

    Dev Studio error

    I don't want to click OK, because it's not OK at all, and I don't want to click Cancel either, because the operation I tried to perform has not been completed yet - not that it's going to get completed at this rate.  If it's going to give me two irrelevant buttons, it should at least supply a FileNotFound button as well, along with the button I really want to click, which is "There Would Be If You Had Used MY Selection, You @#$@$#!!".

     

  • Syrion (unregistered) in reply to Bill Waite

    The really-actually-real WTF is that I just type the search from France and had another results  : "1 - 5 of about 218"... asking for ignored results I got "1 - 10 of about 218".

    A WTF Gov. Agency may have been asking Google for snipping some part of the results. (And I surely have to revise my english courses cause I'm not sure about sequence of tenses in the previous sentence...)

     CAPTCHA : knowhutimean (this is a long one - failling this test is not meaning you're not a human but just a little bit lazy)

  • (cs)
    Robert Synnott:

    [image]

    Welcome to Microsoft Colonial Power 2007.

    Umm, wasn't that one called Age of Empires? 

  • (cs)
    A chicken passeth by:
    Ah, I remember this message - I install a lot of Japanese apps that insist on using Japanese codepages - even when i don't have any. Result: the app install info appears in gibberish that the Windows Installer can't understand.

    Try going to regional settings and installing the language tools (you need 200+ MB and your WinXP install CD). Once you can see recognizable (i.e non-computer-gibberish) language you should be able to uninstall the app.

    200+ megs just to uninstall an application?  That would of course explain our all-time favorite from Pop-up Potpourri: Givin' It 120%...

    cantdeletepopup.jpg 

  • (cs) in reply to GeekMessage

    GeekMessage:
    Dec. 31, 1969 wouldn't be (time_t)(-1), by any chance?

     The more likely explanation is that it's (time_t)0, which is Jan 1 1970 GMT, but Dec 31 1969 PST.
     

  • (cs)

    LOL, to the guy that said that the Outlook error was doctored ... it's completely legitimate. It looks a little odd because of the cleartype and the custom XP theme I was using at the time. This error came up when I was playing with the form designing tools in Outlook 2007 beta 2. If you've got Outlook 2007, enable the developer tab in the options, open up a new message, click the developer tab, click Design This Form, and drag a Flag Status item onto the form. It comes up like above .. though it might be fixed in beta 2 tech refresh.

    Those were pretty much my exact words, yes :P
     

    -- Ben 

  • KG2V (unregistered) in reply to merreborn

    3 = 653 for suffciently large values of 3, or small values of 653...

  • Shalin (unregistered)

    Once I was installing a modem by a company called Dax on Windows98. For some reasons it couldn't complete it's install process. Every time I started my computer the modem software used to ask me "Are you still in India?". It was hilarious! Too bad I don't have a screenshot right now.

  • Jamie Plucinski (unregistered)

    You're only half right. The X means there is no coverage (signal) and can also mean the radio part of the phone is off, which is highly unlikely in this case since you can see the WiFi icon near the battery, meaning that the phone is on (no flight-mode and thus wifi and radio work) and this person isn't quite as much as a n00b as you suggest.

  • (cs) in reply to Jamie Plucinski

    Got this the other day. Really helpful.

    Error message 

     

  • (cs)
    Anonymous:


    Maybe it's because they're read only? I've seen stuff like this not copy because they're read-only and/or only really 'touchable' by the Administrator account. Still a WTF for them saying 'not critical OS files'....many a day is it that i have to make sure that boot.ini actually exists on a system that won't boot Windows...
  • (cs)

    Anonymous:

    Er, "the following files" - I'm pretty sure it's saying that the log file isn't critical.  Although I don't know why it says "there were 3 errors encountered" and then proceeds to list four, 

  • (cs) in reply to iwpg

    I got the following message after installing Internet Explorer 7... apparently its security is so advanced, it won't even let itself open! 

    Internet Explorer 7 Error Message

  • vinny (unregistered) in reply to Manni

    Chocobots are from a really old squaresoft game called mystic quest, which was released on the original gameboy. a chocobo(bird thingy) got broken legs and was fixed by some doctor/mechanic dude with metal legs, which enabled him to walk on water somehow...

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    And actually, I suppose I'll wrap up with a request from Marco Gruss. If anyone knows how to uninstall [image], please let him know. Again, he's trying to uninstall [image], so if you have any experience with that, do share ...

    [image]

     



    Ah yes... most likely it is in another language. Fire up your applocale and choose the appropriate language. That is the most probable scenario.
  • computer doggie (unregistered)

    01001 translates to 'H' ???

  • computer doggie (unregistered)

    To uninstall U<ìƒì□SVWUü<E□÷@□□:

    1. Reboot into Safe Mode.
    2. Open Windows Explorer.
    3. Go to C:.
    4. Highlight Everything except WINDOWS, Documents and Settings and Program Files.
    5. Press Shift+Del. (a joke)
  • Sean (unregistered)

    I think that in order to uninstall U⟨ƒì□SVWUü<]□⟨E□÷@□□ you have to go into □ũ⟨śAEv6ęę⟨□ũōŋ, click on 𧽗𧾜䜻鱟, open the 鱼䊻zªCVdµ¶ menu, and choose ⟨□AV6^^©. Go to the »»ÞøþČrAAers list, click on U⟨ƒì□SVWUü<]□⟨E□÷@□□, and click on »»ÞøþČrAA.

  • chinesefurniture (unregistered)

    Www.antiques-furniture-chinese.com started our Chinese Antique Furniture business 12 years ago, since then have grown bigger and stronger year by year. 12 years experiences allow us to create award-winning designs, combining traditional Chinese styles Chinese Traditional Furniture with functions for today’s modern lifestyle.We aim to offer hard-to-find, high quality antique and reproduction furniture that will not only stand up to use for decades to come, but will make a unique statement of your home.

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