• RandomUser423699 (unregistered) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    There is no accepted rule for comparing two undefined quantities.
    Don't know if it is "accepted", but I would expect: #UNDEF #ANY_OPERATOR #ANY_OPERAND = #UNDEF

    And in case your operator of choice isn't usually commutative: #ANY_OPERAND #ANY_OPERATOR #UNDEF = #UNDEF

  • Dave C. (unregistered) in reply to brunascle
    brunascle:
    ... Around a year later, the list of subscribers got this weird garbage email. The next day they got another. And another. This went on for several days. I contacted the third party, and it turns out that deleting the email doesn't prevent it from going out. I was supposed to unschedule it. All deleting it did was prevent me from ever unscheduling it again.

    Ha! This is a much better WTF than the OP. Thanks!

  • (cs) in reply to Eldon
    Eldon:

    1/0 is not the same as 100/0

    Example:

    lim (1/x)*x = 1 x->0

    lim (100/x)*x = 100 x->0

    Congratulations, you've proven that the function (1/x)*x does not equal the function (100/x)*x. I think we can all agree on that. Now, what does that have to do with whether 1/0 equals 100/0?

  • Wyrdo (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Was there supposed to be some sort of feedback indicating mail was being/had been sent?

    If not, then I can sort of see a business manager thinking nothing had happened and clicking again. I probably would have too.

    Of course, that's a mistake you only make once.

    Actually, it appears that the number of times you make the mistake varies depending on the latency between the second button press and the arrival of the second copy of the email in the monitor email acct.

    Furry cows moo and decompress.

  • Wyrdo (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    Yeah. TRWTF is the UI. There should always be an "Are you sure?" on actions that could have major consequences. Of course in that case the power users complain that the system is mothering them, so if you're the designer of a system, you might lose either way.

    Furry cows moo and decompress.

  • Mark Iter (unregistered) in reply to Shoruke
    Shoruke:
    "OMG U GUISE HOEM DEPOSES' LOGO IS RED AND PRUPLE NOW OMFG LETS GO BAI STUFF RITE NAO"
    Curiously, this exact string appears in a tape backup I once made of a marketer's brain. I accuse you of copyright infringement!

    Either that or they're all stamped out from the same mold.

  • Monica Lewinsky (unregistered) in reply to Mathy
    Mathy:
    With the level of mathematical rigor that is apparently acceptable here, you might as well demonstrate that 100/0 is 100 times more than 1/0. "How?", you say?

    Simple. Take the ratio of the two: (100/0) / (1/0) = (100 * 0) / (1 * 0) = 100 / 1 = 1 Just have to cancel the zeros to see that 100/0 is in fact larger than 1/0!

    100/1 = 1?

  • Wyrdo (unregistered) in reply to Buffled
    Buffled:
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    TRWTF is not using dd

    TRWTF is the UI on dd! I mean, I've used it before, the program has it good points. But dude! Never have I seen a goofier interface.

    Furry cows moo and decompress.

  • Anonymous Brave (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    I wonder if he knows where his ass is and if he would be able to distinguish it from his elbow.

    Probably not if he's a native Spanish speaker... you see, in Spanish the word for ass is "culo" and the word for elbow is "codo", as you can easily notice, they both have four letters, both start with a "c" and end with a "o", they are both facing back, both wrinkled, and he cannot get his nose into either to smell the difference, so it is all the same for him!.

  • Ralph (unregistered) in reply to Wyrdo
    Wyrdo:
    TRWTF is the UI. There should always be an "Are you sure?" on actions that could have major consequences.
    No there shouldn't. I'm always sure of what I'm doing. I might, occasionally, be wrong, but even then I'm sure. Asking me doesn't do anything other than slow me down and prevent me from scripting my work, which slows me down a thousand times more and makes me want to hunt you down and torture you until you stop tormenting me.
  • (cs)

    I dunno, sounds like "spam spam" to me, if it's going to people that didn't ask for it.

    Best story I ever got from bulk mail people: At one point, one of the large e-commerce companies made a small mistake. They pushed the button which sent a mailing to EXACTLY and ONLY the list of "never send me anything again" addresses. To this day, no one has ever been able to explain why such an item existed in the user interface, but I have corroboration by other parties that, yes, the interface did indeed have that as an option.

    ... Oops.

  • (cs)

    BTDT, except it was in the dark ages, and pushing the button generated actual paper mail via a Quick Basic front end to a mainframe app.

    Easy to fix, just chuck the extra copies into the recycle bin - and actually recycled the paper.

    I have been a software developer for WAAAAAAAAAAY too long.

  • Dreadwolf (unregistered) in reply to Bruce Banner
    Bruce Banner:
    swarms of graphic designers and copywriters actually built the promotional materials; they fought it out over the proper values for kerning in the banner and what color the footer should be
    Kill them all!!! Email is for text!

    Seriously, this is yet another example of failing to understand that other people don't have your computer. Just because it looks pretty on your screen, that is no guarantee it will look anything similar on another email viewing program.

    I got a promotional email a few weeks ago that was solid black -- literally impossible to see any of the content. I sure hope the a-holes who sent it paid a ton of money for airhead "graphics designers" and two tons to the spambotherds.

    No, e-mail is for communication, fuckhead. Stop waiting for the world to be "enlightened" and start targeting the lowest common denominator to the exclusion of all else. Most (99%) recipients of e-mail are using graphical browsers to access webmail or a GUI e-mail client on a modern operating system. Just because you use pine on a 386 running Mandrake Linux, wget images individually and print them on your dot-matrix printer doesn't make you cool or hip.

    Done properly it's perfectly possible to have an e-mail that fails back gracefully, providing plaintext as well as HTML/images/video, allowing individual clients to decide what they can handle/what to show. [a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-5.1.4"]Read all about it[/a] and welcome to 1996.

  • Smegzor (unregistered)

    TRWTF is I pushed the button many times and didn't see a single rainbow or unicorn! WTF?

  • Anonymous Brave (unregistered)
    Does 1/0 equals 100/0?

    Yes it does:

    1/0 = UNDEFINED DIVISION BY ZERO

    100/0 = UNDEFINED DIVISION BY ZERO

    Infinite/0 = UNDEFINED DIVISION BY ZERO

  • (cs) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

    Sure there's a WTF: You executed a command writing directly to a disk partition without double-checking.

  • Bruce Banner (unregistered) in reply to Dreadwolf
    Dreadwolf:
    Bruce Banner:
    swarms of graphic designers and copywriters actually built the promotional materials; they fought it out over the proper values for kerning in the banner and what color the footer should be
    Kill them all!!! Email is for text!

    Seriously, this is yet another example of failing to understand that other people don't have your computer. Just because it looks pretty on your screen, that is no guarantee it will look anything similar on another email viewing program.

    I got a promotional email a few weeks ago that was solid black -- literally impossible to see any of the content. I sure hope the a-holes who sent it paid a ton of money for airhead "graphics designers" and two tons to the spambotherds.

    No, e-mail is for communication, fuckhead. Stop waiting for the world to be "enlightened" and start targeting the lowest common denominator to the exclusion of all else. Most (99%) recipients of e-mail are using graphical browsers to access webmail or a GUI e-mail client on a modern operating system. Just because you use pine on a 386 running Mandrake Linux, wget images individually and print them on your dot-matrix printer doesn't make you cool or hip.

    Done properly it's perfectly possible to have an e-mail that fails back gracefully, providing plaintext as well as HTML/images/video, allowing individual clients to decide what they can handle/what to show. [a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-5.1.4"]Read all about it[/a] and welcome to 1996.

    Thank you for informing me I am a fuckhead. Armed with that new knowledge I am very close to being persuaded by your wisdom.

    However you must have been thinking of some other fuckhead when you mentioned "pine on a 386 running Mandrake Linux" etc. because someone as wise as you I'm sure has telepathic ability and should have known that in fact I was using MS Windows, MS Internet Explorer, and MS Outlook Web Access when I got the delightfully solid black email.

    And I guess it was my fault as the recipient that it wasn't "done properly" to "fall back gracefully" righto smartypants?

  • (cs) in reply to seebs
    seebs:
    I dunno, sounds like "spam spam" to me, if it's going to people that didn't ask for it.

    Best story I ever got from bulk mail people: At one point, one of the large e-commerce companies made a small mistake. They pushed the button which sent a mailing to EXACTLY and ONLY the list of "never send me anything again" addresses. To this day, no one has ever been able to explain why such an item existed in the user interface, but I have corroboration by other parties that, yes, the interface did indeed have that as an option.

    ... Oops.

    For those places where spamming people who opted-out is illegal, that could get really expensive.

  • LebensWert (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    You are confusing "c + x * c" and "x * c" as being the same when using these expressions.

    It's a very common error among English speakers (though not only in English, the problem exists in other languages as well). It's so common that I'd always recommend avoiding the "bla times more" expression altogether, as even if you use it correctly, 50% of the people might misunderstand it.

  • (cs) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    Anonymous:
    Oh my lord, you must be joking. How many years have we been using online forms? How many times have we read that little warning next to some submit button that says "Only click the submit button ONCE"?
    If I see a warning like that I immediately stop using the site. If the developer doesn't know enough about web design/data integrity/security to make a form submission idempotent, there's absolutely no way I'm sending any more information their way.

    And by the way, I stopped seeing those warnings long, long ago. Designers have by and large figured it out.

    Or so you would think. About a week ago I was using the online banking for a rather large national bank. I was trying to transfer money from one account to another. I accidentally double clicked the "transfer" button. My first thought was, "no big deal, obviously the programmers did the write thing." Then I noticed that two transfers had gone through!

    Yeah, it was my fault that I clicked the button twice. But it wasn't intentional my finger kind of spasmed. It should be the programmers responsibility for preventing this.

  • Anone (unregistered) in reply to Ralph
    Ralph:
    Wyrdo:
    TRWTF is the UI. There should always be an "Are you sure?" on actions that could have major consequences.
    No there shouldn't. I'm always sure of what I'm doing. I might, occasionally, be wrong, but even then I'm sure. Asking me doesn't do anything other than slow me down and prevent me from scripting my work, which slows me down a thousand times more and makes me want to hunt you down and torture you until you stop tormenting me.

    There's a difference between being sure of what you're intending to do and sure of what you're actually doing, which is why competent 'Are you sure?' queries explain the potential downside.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    God has his ways of delivering Justice. Serves them right for sending unsolicited spam to 50000 people. Also, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that thedailywtf.com thinks there is a "spam spam" and a "not spam spam". THAT is TRWTF.

    I pray the next time he presses it TEN times. When he sees nothing happening, someone says, "Wait, let me try". TEN times. Then the next guy. TEN times, and so on. Till the company goes bankrupt.

  • Nick (unregistered) in reply to schmitter
    schmitter:
    Of course they needed a bulk e-mailer. You have any idea how long it takes to print out 150000 messages, place them on a wood table, take a picture, scan the picture and send them off?
    No, no, no. You only need to print out one message and take one photo. Then you just need to copy the image file 150,000 times. Easy!
    Anonymous:
    God has his ways of delivering Justice. Serves them right for sending unsolicited spam to 50000 people. Also, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that thedailywtf.com thinks there is a "spam spam" and a "not spam spam". THAT is TRWTF.
    You need to read the article again, Spam is defined as UNSOLICITED bulk email, if the recipients are signed up to a newsletter, then it is not unsolicited.
  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to Skilldrick
    Skilldrick:
    Where do you keep your asses in the US?

    In our trousers (unless we're politicians).

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to SilverEyes
    SilverEyes:
    yo dogg i herd u like parables so i broke all ur windows so you can profit while u lern

    Windows comes pre-broken from the source.

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to BF
    BF:
    Also am I the only one that thinks should've is a valid contraction of should have?

    Always has been. Then again, I'm an editor who likes to sometimes start sentences but-first.

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to brunascle
    brunascle:
    I work as a web developer for a news/magazine website. We have opt-in daily newsletters of the day's top stories, which currently has over 100,000 subscribers.

    We use a third party to actually send out the emails. Our CMS contacts the third party via a web service, giving it body of the HTML email and the date and time to send it out.

    A few years ago, when our CMS was being rewritten, I tested the newsletter functionality with dates of about a year in the future, with random garbage in the email. Then I would go into the third-party's website and delete the scheduled emails.

    Around a year later, the list of subscribers got this weird garbage email. The next day they got another. And another. This went on for several days. I contacted the third party, and it turns out that deleting the email doesn't prevent it from going out. I was supposed to unschedule it. All deleting it did was prevent me from ever unscheduling it again.

    Now I remember you ...

    (Apologies to Steven Wright.)

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to A Mathmetician
    A Mathmetician:
    I'm not posting again.

    And we're going to hold you to that promise!

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to ÃÆâ€â„
    ÃÆâ€â„:
    You guys do know that javascript does more than form validation and annoying popups now, right?

    Yes. And priests do more than lay people.

  • Captain Normal Form (unregistered) in reply to Dreadwolf
    Dreadwolf:

    No, e-mail is for communication, fuckhead. Stop waiting for the world to be "enlightened" and start targeting the lowest common denominator to the exclusion of all else. Most (99%) recipients of e-mail are using graphical browsers to access webmail or a GUI e-mail client on a modern operating system. Just because you use pine on a 386 running Mandrake Linux, wget images individually and print them on your dot-matrix printer doesn't make you cool or hip.

    The reason to target the lowest COMMON denominator is that IT IS THE MOST COMMON SUPPORTED SYSTEM. Why target 95% when you can reach 100%?

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to Captain Normal Form
    Captain Normal Form:
    Why target 95% when you can reach 100%?

    Exactly. I'm stunned by the number of business people who are willing to accept the developer telling them "We won't go to the trouble of making this compatible with X. Only about 5% of the people use that, anyway."

    They certainly wouldn't accept someone saying, "I'll stand at the door and tell 1 in every 20 customers they can't come in the shop."

  • Donald (unregistered)

    I will have to start publishing my own code to TWTF if the article content on the site is going to drop to the likes of this one. I will probably get fired as well as laughed at, but sorry to say, this was really disappointing.

  • Matt Westwood (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    Ok! Remy Martin sock puppet count up to 3!
    1. Silver Eyes
    2. Anonymous 3 (possibly) Matt Westwood

    I don't know about the other Matt Westwood (or West Mattwood or whatever else it posts under) but I most certainly am not a sock puppet of someone named after some fancy girlie drink.

  • Amtep (unregistered) in reply to ÃÆâ€â„Â
    ÃÆâ€â„Â:
    boog:
    That's so true. It's literally impossible to give up "control of your computer" without your identity being thieved. That's why I wrote my own OS, my own web browser, my own office suite, and all my own computer games, and haven't looked back.
    Richard Stallman, is that you?
    Don't be silly. Richard Stallman doesn't write games.
  • Olius (unregistered)

    FROM

    He built the model FROM the address pool.

    Would you build a chair off of wood? Build a house off of bricks? Build an sandwich off of cheese?

    ffs...

  • (cs) in reply to schmitter
    schmitter:
    Of course they needed a bulk e-mailer. You have any idea how long it takes to print out 150000 messages, place them on a wood table, take a picture, scan the picture and send them off, from an embedded system with no filesystem?

    FTFY.

  • Sarcastic kebab reaper (unregistered)

    That story reminds me. I used to be in tech support once for a small gov office. There was this one lady, who, despite using computer in everyday work, somehow didn't quite capture its spirit. She always complained that her computer is slow, and to be honest, it was true. But it wasn't entirely the fault of the machine. To launch MS Word, she pointed carefully the mouse to the icon, and double clicked on it. Then, after 2-3 seconds, she double clicked it again. And again. And again. She clicked the icon, until the window finally appeared. Along with 15 other "New Documents."

  • (cs)

    Cornify doesn't work for me on this page. Oh the drama. Also, where do you guys find article source texts?

  • Stretch (unregistered)

    The RWTF is the word kerning

  • anonymousse (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius

    This is what happens:

  • JuanCarlosII (unregistered) in reply to oheso
    oheso:
    Captain Normal Form:
    Why target 95% when you can reach 100%?

    Exactly. I'm stunned by the number of business people who are willing to accept the developer telling them "We won't go to the trouble of making this compatible with X. Only about 5% of the people use that, anyway."

    They certainly wouldn't accept someone saying, "I'll stand at the door and tell 1 in every 20 customers they can't come in the shop."

    That's entirely dependent on what "this" is. If it's your core business functionality then clearly it needs to be accessible to 99.9999...% of your users, but that's no good reason not to offer the best possible experience to all of your users.

    A better analogy would be playing music in a shop, even though x% of your customers are deaf.

    TRWTF is insisting on the same experience for everyone. It's called progressive enhancement, and it's they way all websites should be made.

  • Rupee (unregistered) in reply to wtf
    wtf:
    Markp:
    Anon:
    SilverEyes:
    Zack:
    You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

    Nah, I think you missed the point, or English class or something. An event that happened once has happened 1 more time than never happening. An event that happened 100 times has happened 100 more times than never happening. Neither has happened infinitely more times than any amount of times.

    If you get one spam message and you wanted zero, you got exactly one more spam message than you wanted.

    Oh, dog, here we go with today's mindless philosophizing.

    It is written: "The seeker of knowledge approached a wise man. 'Tell me, Wise One, how is x010F pronounced?' And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Tell me, wise one, may one begin a sentence with a conjunction, or is such a thing forbidden by the laws?'. And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Tell me, your sagacity, is one infinitely greater than zero, or is it one greater than zero?'. And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Oh, great sage, you beat me with the club of cleverness, but I am no more clever than before, how can this be?' cried the seeker. The wise man replied, 'It's actually just a stick, I keep hoping you'll go away if I hit you often enough, but here you are.'"

    Did someone say mindless philosophizing? I can never resist a call like that...

    Hmmm, there is some ambiguity here. I'm not a very good mathemtician, so I'm sure I'll be corrected if I get this wrong but, the way I see it, it all hangs on the term "x more".

    If we are doing addition, and we take "100 more than zero" to mean 0 + someValue = 100, then someValue is 100.

    But if we are doing multiplication, and we take "100 more than zero" to mean 0 * someValue = 100, then someValue is infinite.

    If I was using the term "x more" I think I'd use it to mean addition.

    "I've got 67 more characters to type and then I'm going to post this nonsense!"

  • tero (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    When I was playing around with my first Linux install, I wanted to mount the DOS/Windows3.1 partition in there. For whatever reason 'mount' just wasn't working. So digging around the man-pages I found 'mkdosfs'.

    mkdosfs is used to create an MS-DOS file system under
Linux on a device (usually a disk partition). device is the
special file corresponding to the device (e.g /dev/hdXX).
block-count is the number of blocks on the device. If
omitted, mkdosfs automatically determiness the file system
size.

    TRWTF is that the manpage looks chillingly familiar after over 15 years... Yeah, there probably was a prompt that said "Are you SURE you want to make the filesystem?", but no mention about destroying all the data, or that this is the command that every other OS on the planet calls "format".

  • Sir Robin-The-Not-So-Brave (unregistered) in reply to Hugo
    Hugo:
    Cbuttius:
    Let's do the Maths:

    They have sent out 100,000 more e-mails than they were meant to. 5,000 users unsubscribed as a result So it will take 20 runs to break even.

    I have never tried this by the way, but "Do-Not-Reply" e-mail addresses really annoy me, and I would like to see what happened if you e-mailed one with an e-mail apparently from itself.

    Better yet, from another noreply emailaddress, to make sure it isn't stopped by some sort of innerloop detection ;)

    Fortunately this rarely causes problems. Properly configured MTA's will bounce during the SMTP connection. Those that don't behave well are promptly cut off from the web by means of natural selection.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to whiskeyjack
    whiskeyjack:
    I get it! Because seven ate nine!
    You're a star, thanks for the laugh!!
  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to feugiat
    feugiat:
    This was at least partly caused by not giving any visual clue that the button-pushing had an effect.

    Or by the manager not having a clue.

    I'm sure you mean "AND by the manager not having a clue"

  • bd (unregistered)
    Clayton never asked to push the button again.
    So, what happened to Clayton?

    He wised up? Impossible, he's a business manager. Got fired? See above. Got his index finger chopped off? We might be on to something...

  • causa (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    whiskeyjack:
    I get it! Because seven ate nine!
    You're a dumbass, thanks for letting us laugh at your ignorance!!
    FTFY
  • Ah but (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Bono:
    TRWTF is this article being on The Daily WTF. So some guy clicks a button more than once? Is that really the best submission you got?
    Seems to be better than the best you can do, Bono. What's the matter, forgot how to submit an article?

    I don't need to be a chicken to know I don't like eggs

  • Tyler Durden (unregistered) in reply to tero
    tero:
    Markp:
    One time, I typed 
    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    When I was playing around with my first Linux install, I wanted to mount the DOS/Windows3.1 partition in there. For whatever reason 'mount' just wasn't working. So digging around the man-pages I found 'mkdosfs'.

    mkdosfs is used to create an MS-DOS file system under
Linux on a device (usually a disk partition). device is the
special file corresponding to the device (e.g /dev/hdXX).
block-count is the number of blocks on the device. If
omitted, mkdosfs automatically determiness the file system
size.

    TRWTF is that the manpage looks chillingly familiar after over 15 years... Yeah, there probably was a prompt that said "Are you SURE you want to make the filesystem?", but no mention about destroying all the data, or that this is the command that every other OS on the planet calls "format".

    One time I took a firearm, loaded a round, cocked the hammer, put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger. You'll never guess what happened next.

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