• (cs)

    I once tried to apply for a job that had an empty combo box as a required field. It was for a web development company. I decided that I didn't want to work there.

    Later I realized it was just a very annoying way to say that they didn't have any positions open.

  • (cs) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    £sd originated from the Latin words "librae, solidi, denarii".

  • (cs) in reply to Zemm
    Zemm:
    da Doctah:
    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    £sd originated from the Latin words "librae, solidi, denarii".

    And here all this time I thought it was "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

  • John (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Peter:
    Also, back when we had pounds, shillings and pence, we used either "£sd" or "£//", not both at the same time. We would have written either "£11/8/10" or "£11 8s 10d". (Well, perhaps it was different back in Stuart times, but that's how we did it in the 20th century).

    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    Pause again to wonder how farthings fit into this notation.

    You've also got to consider the mindset in calling a single cent a penny.

  • (cs) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Pause again to wonder how farthings fit into this notation.
    One farthing was ¼ of a penny, and it was always written with a fraction like that (e.g., £11 18s 10¼d). Thank goodness it was all scrapped decades ago, because it made handling money in calculations enormously more complex.
  • Liviu (unregistered)

    These messages are so funny. As a programmer, I laughed out loud probably disturbing my neighbors, but I'm sure they understand.

  • (cs) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    da Doctah:
    Pause again to wonder how farthings fit into this notation.
    One farthing was ¼ of a penny, and it was always written with a fraction like that (e.g., £11 18s 10¼d). Thank goodness it was all scrapped decades ago, because it made handling money in calculations enormously more complex.

    A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to work with a system that handled financial transactions in just about any currency in existence. We had one big table that tied the IATA code, the spelled-out name of the currency, current exchange rates, and (the kicker) an indication of how that particular currency broke down into sub-units, with possible settings of zero, one, two or three decimal places. It was important to know this because some transaction sources merely implied the location of the decimal point and you didn't want to charge someone 10000 simoleons if they meant to charge 100.00 instead.

    Zero was for things like Japanese yen, two for US Dollar, British pound, Euro and a whole host of others. I had to hunt quite a bit before finding examples of three decimal places, which turned out to be Tunisian and Bahraini dinar. Never did find a currency that traded in "units-and-tenths".

    (I also spent some time casting about in case there might still be a currency with non-decimal subdivisions, such as existed in Britain in the 60s. There were one or two, but they were always in "twentieths", which means you could use the two-decimal-place setting and handle all your amounts to the nearest "nickel".)

  • (cs) in reply to Liviu

    That's the oddest spam ever.

  • Clive (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah

    [quote user="da Doctah"][quote user="Peter"]

    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    [/quote] "d" standard for Denarii obviously. I thought everyone knew that. Why? Because England was invaded by the Romans some years ago, and not everything moved on from then.

  • hoodaticus (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    That's the oddest spam ever.
    Yeah, it disturbed me too.
  • Mick (unregistered) in reply to Bill&Ted
    Bill&Ted:
    Candy:
    it's a little hard to see how an increase from $0 to $221 is only a 25% increase!

    double percentage; try { percentage = 100 * newAmount / oldAmount; } catch (...) { // Just guess 25 percent; usually close enough. percentage = 25; }

    You might want to check your formula in the non-exceptional case. Either that or my balance has just increased by 100%. And again! And again!...

    Nope. Your bank balance hasn't been touched anywhere in those formulas - only looked at....

  • Digger (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Zemm:
    da Doctah:
    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    £sd originated from the Latin words "librae, solidi, denarii".

    And here all this time I thought it was "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

    LSD - How appropriate, both for the currency and the song...

  • Joshua (unregistered) in reply to Jerry
    Jerry:
    <snip> I really don't get why people expect some bare modicum of reasonable functionality from nearly everything they purchase -- except software, where total idiocy and asshattery are fully acceptable as par for the course.

    I suppose many people realise that software is a lot more complex than most of the things that they buy.

    Of course we could (not sure how successfully) argue that many Civil Engineering feats are equally as complex, and provide better quality, but a significant difference is the large volumes of money available up front. That is, although some software may eventually make enough money to cover a significant Building Project, there is rarely capital available up-front to spend the sort of money required to build a perfect system (and buildings fail spectacularly from time to time anyways).

    The reality (and thankfully this site seems to have twisted toward this way of thinking in the last year or two) is that all good programmers have at some time written bad components, or even bad applications - any programmer that claims not to have, either isn't good enough to work on projects where they have had the opportunity to make mistakes, or is lying.
    That said, although most of us bag M$ and other large software producers, the reality is that most of the time they do actually produce reasonably functional pieces of software. It is impossible to please all people all the time, so the best we can hope for is pleasing most of the people some of the time. With this in mind, some features may not be to our taste, and at times we may experience errors because the designers did not expect the software to be used the way that we do. In other words, I'm not sure the assertion that total idiocy is accepted in the Software Industry is all that accurate...

    A non-IT WTF that people seem to readily accept: there is a (at least one, there are probably others) car manufacturer that pipes the AirCon and Heater through cup holders to keep cold drinks cold, and hot drinks hot. This may sound like a brilliant idea, but let's think about what happens to my drink (refrigerated to somewhere around 4C {I think about 39F}) when we pump 15C {59F} air around it? I'll give you a clue - it doesn't exactly get cooler.

  • (cs) in reply to Doug
    Doug:
    You . . . must . . . Submit
    By your command, My Lord.

    filed under: Battlestar Evony

  • (cs)

    Wait 5 seconds before reading.

  • (cs) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    Pause again to wonder how farthings fit into this notation.

    You forgot that the crossed L still stands for 'pounds'. (And damn the Italians for giving up the Lira.)

    Still, much of the world is completely unfazed by the dollar being signified by a crossed 'S'.

  • $ (unregistered) in reply to Bellinghman
    Bellinghman:
    da Doctah:
    Pause now to consider a mindset in which "d" stands for "pence".

    Pause again to wonder how farthings fit into this notation.

    You forgot that the crossed L still stands for 'pounds'. (And damn the Italians for giving up the Lira.)

    Still, much of the world is completely unfazed by the dollar being signified by a crossed 'S'.

    The $ was the symbol for the Spanish peso de ocho, which was widely used in the American colonies because British currency of the time was largely disfunctional. When we made our own country we kept the symbol, and later on Spain changed theirs for whatever reason.

    themoreyouknow.jpg

  • (cs) in reply to $
    $:
    Bellinghman:
    Still, much of the world is completely unfazed by the dollar being signified by a crossed 'S'.
    The $ was the symbol for the Spanish peso de ocho, which was widely used in the American colonies because British currency of the time was largely disfunctional. When we made our own country we kept the symbol, and later on Spain changed theirs for whatever reason.

    themoreyouknow.jpg

    That 'S' stood for a currency unit that starts with a 'P' rather than the modern one that starts with a 'D' is adding to the confusion, of course.

    (And yes, I am aware that the 'S' stands for the 's' in 'Peso' rather than its initial.)

  • grumpy (unregistered)
    TK:
    <nice rant>
    Remember: down, not across.
  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    dkf:
    da Doctah:
    Pause again to wonder how farthings fit into this notation.
    One farthing was ¼ of a penny, and it was always written with a fraction like that (e.g., £11 18s 10¼d). Thank goodness it was all scrapped decades ago, because it made handling money in calculations enormously more complex.

    A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to work with a system that handled financial transactions in just about any currency in existence. We had one big table that tied the IATA code, the spelled-out name of the currency, current exchange rates, and (the kicker) an indication of how that particular currency broke down into sub-units, with possible settings of zero, one, two or three decimal places. It was important to know this because some transaction sources merely implied the location of the decimal point and you didn't want to charge someone 10000 simoleons if they meant to charge 100.00 instead.

    Zero was for things like Japanese yen, two for US Dollar, British pound, Euro and a whole host of others. I had to hunt quite a bit before finding examples of three decimal places, which turned out to be Tunisian and Bahraini dinar. Never did find a currency that traded in "units-and-tenths".

    (I also spent some time casting about in case there might still be a currency with non-decimal subdivisions, such as existed in Britain in the 60s. There were one or two, but they were always in "twentieths", which means you could use the two-decimal-place setting and handle all your amounts to the nearest "nickel".)

    On that note, do remember the old Spanish currency was broken down into 12.5 cents. Which is why they're called "pieces of 8" (8 to make a whole). And also where we got the old tune "Shave and a hair cut, two bits" (i.e., a shave and a hair cut, for a quarter), with a "bit" meaning, one of the pieces of 8.

    Fun currency history.

  • Jake (unregistered)

    Wow. Thanks for blocking out that url with X's, K Bay. No one would ever be able to figure Netapp.com out!

  • e john (unregistered)

    I couldn't find a process named applicationName ...

    Well, of COURSE you could not ! The dialog box states that the process name is ApplicationName. I don't know how it coudl be more clear.

    Gee whiz.

  • ysth (unregistered)

    Err, I don't see any screwball comedies there.

  • golddog (unregistered) in reply to Jerry
    Jerry:
    I really don't get why people expect some bare modicum of reasonable functionality from nearly everything they purchase -- except software, where total idiocy and asshattery are fully acceptable as par for the course.

    Agreed. I've often said, when reviewing software, "if they can't get the little things right, how can we expect them to get the big things right?"

    For example, we're forced by a certain group of idiots to use JD Edwards' time recording software. If you're entering time off, ofr example, you have to click on an icon, which brings up another form listing the various types of time off and their numeric codes. Selecting one and closing the form puts you back on the original form, with the selected code showing.

    Because, you know, there's no way to deliver an enumerated list of key/value pairs across http in a web form to eliminate all that clicking.

    Oh, and it turns out (not surprisingly) that they can't get the big things right either.

  • Design Pattern (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    and (the kicker) an indication of how that particular currency broke down into sub-units, with possible settings of zero, one, two or three decimal places. Zero was for things like Japanese yen, two for US Dollar, British pound, Euro and a whole host of others. I had to hunt quite a bit before finding examples of three decimal places, which turned out to be Tunisian and Bahraini dinar. Never did find a currency that traded in "units-and-tenths".
    TRWTF is assuming decimal sub-units.

    Lookup Malagasy ariary for an example of a currency with a non-decimal subunit.

  • David Connely (unregistered)

    At least it took less than 2 days to store the Internet.

  • Ryan (unregistered)

    Netflix probably relies on user ratings/rental history to determine "you may also like" recommendations. Chances are, not TOO many people have rented that Marx Brothers film in the past, so you get some other Marx Brothers recommendations, and then some other random films that other users have also rented along with the Marx Brothers. This is not a huge surprise.

  • tortoise (unregistered) in reply to Vacaloca

    That sounds about right. If an average page has 5 images on it, that's barely over 190 terabytes per page!

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