The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2013-05-19 Reply Admin

Andrew:
tin:
EuroGuy:
Can we please stop submitting very high / negative / NaN numbers on progress bars?

As a general rule, I would agree... But come on... This one was a massive time in a product called "Time Machine" - see the funny side of it now?
I don't care what it's called; it's still not funny. Not in the "OMG someone died" way, but in the "i've seen this shit too many times" way.

I would swear we've seen a lot of Time Machine in Error'd.

FUCK

Ever notice the comment count decreases on Fridays? That's because most people are sick of Error'd, but rather than complain about get something they're not interested one day a week, they simply don't come here to complain. You know what the problem is, and (unless you're a damn sight dumber than I assume) you know how to fix it (HINT: Complaining ain't the way).

It's like the people who like to transform their car into a race car and then compalin at all the attention they get from police because "they're just picking on me". When you know what's causing the probelm, and that problem is something where you have a choice, then there's probably a resolution that's a lot simpler than you think.

Sidenote: I was at the supermarket yesterday, and they had some promotion on Chocolate Milk that allowed free samples for customers. Naturally I gave the lady serving them an hour-long tirade about how they should be offering iced coffee rather than chocolate....

2013-05-19 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Use the isNaN() method.

if(isNan(Grandma))
{
  document.Write("Whadda ya know");
}

2013-05-19 Reply Admin

Neveralull:
jay:
xaade:
eViLegion:
EuroGuy:
Can we please stop submitting anything at all to Error'd? I have now seen enough examples of those and they stop being funny.
Thank you all.

FTFY.

While we are at it, we can stop submitting horrible manager stories, we can stop submitting horrible coder that wants to avoid all useful tools like source control, we can stop submitting horrible code bits that show using a switch to build a table that associates a string with an int because the programmer doesn't know about parse and format methods, and we can stop submitting the horrible manager that doesn't want to look stupid after hiring their third cousin's son to do something and then fires the good programmer. I mean, how many variations can we hear before we get it, life sucks because people are stupid.

As your list covers about 90% of what's on this site, if you aren't interested in hearing this sort of thing, why don't you just stop visiting this site?

Do you also go to Weight Watcher's web site and complain because all they talk about is dieting? Or to a political party's web site and complain that all they talk about is politics?
Obviously the second comment that starts out with "Now that we're at it..." was sarcastic, and went over everybody's head. In other words, he has already pointed out that these types of errors are what this site is all about.

Where?

2013-05-19 Reply Admin

Peter:
Anonymous Coward:
Everything is working as intended. If that makes you go WTF, then I have to WTF at your WTF reaction.
Time Machine can, in some circumstances, display a message telling you that the backup will take "About 3,454,012 days". You think this shows software "working as intended".
WTF?

9,500 years seems a reasonable time for a backup....I hope they've taken into account the decamillenium bug....

2013-05-19 Reply Admin

Pthagonal:
ITS! ITS! ITS!
My God, is't so hard to get this right?! Meh. ;-)

FTFY

2013-05-20 Reply Admin

The Maths:
herby:
No, using higher precision floating point numbers is even worse. You start adding up decimal fractions and you get ever increasing round-off errors, since decimal fractions CANNOT be expressed accurately in binary form.

To nitpick (because it brings me joy), you can express some decimal fractions perfectly accurately in binary.

More obviously if you think about it for a second then the ones you can represent perfectly are obviously going to be the ones that can actually be stored perfectly fine in the type - so even if you want to store 2.57 and it ends up being changed to 2.55 then obviously 2.55 can always be stored just fine without any errors. And that applies in general to any sort of number representation scheme you might care to mention. The real number scheme just accepts different types of imprecisions to integers.

2013-05-21 Reply Admin

Yes, apparently for most people, its [sic]!

Isnt you're time moor valuible than two loose sleep over it?

2013-05-21 Reply Admin

Not Safe for Whales:
Pthagonal:
ITS! ITS! ITS!
My God, is't so hard to get this right?! Meh. ;-)
FTFY

'Sit? 'Tis.

2013-05-21 Reply Admin

really?:
Yes, apparently for most people, its [sic]!
Isnt you're time moor valuible than two loose sleep over it?

I has a knew spell chequer. It came with my pea, see? It plane. Leah Marx IV my revue. Miss Take's eye can knot sea.

2013-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous Coward:
TRWTF is that anyone even thinks that Time Machine snapshot is WTF worthy.
You only ever see that window when you're doing a first backup. You never, ever see it otherwise. When TM initially begins the first backup, there's a bazillion little files that basically take up no space but take a long time to copy because they've never been copied over to the backup before. Usually this takes about 2-3 minutes, then your transfer rate rockets up to a reasonable number. 175GB would probably be about 6 hours on WiFi (802.11n).

I'm not sure why you guys think anything like that is "WTF worthy". It's not. It's lame. Everything is working as intended. If that makes you go WTF, then I have to WTF at your WTF reaction.

TRWTF is that you have become so accustomed to 'time remaining' dialogs that give values in decades and centuries that you don't consider this to be incorrect behavior anymore.

2013-05-24 Reply Admin

I don't see any problem. The backup is going to take over 9000 years. So what? You have a time machine, don't you?

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