• Daniel (unregistered)

    THIS made a WTF? Damn, I should have sent in the screenshot of when my modem reported -2147483644 db :P

  • (cs)

    "Error'd" is never a "real" WTF, you think people would figure that out by now. :D

  • (cs)

    The WTF is actually the name of the post, "Signal to Nose Ratio". :)

  • Daniel (unregistered) in reply to Saladin
    "Error'd" is never a "real" WTF

    Yeah but things like the nut packet containing the 'select blah from table' ingredient is just gold... this? Meh.

    ;)

    Captcha... initial post "ninja".. this one "poindexter". I'm very quickly getting pwned by posters and captchas :(

  • Lummox (unregistered)

    Signal to nose??? Brillant!

  • (cs) in reply to Daniel

    Now -22147483644, that would be a real WTF. This one is just a very good value: signal to noise of 0db means as much signal as noise, 10db means 10 times as much signal as noise, 20db means 100 times, etc., so here there is really very, very little noise; -10db means 10 times more noise than signal, so your modem would be really, really noisy. Suppose the signal would be 1 nW, than the noise would be 10^214748364.4 times as much, which is more energy than there probably is in the universe...

  • Alexander W. Janssen (unregistered)

    Looks like he has a small galaxy between his modem an his ISP's DSLAM...

    Alex.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Two ways to get bad signal/nose: not much signal or very large nose!

  • (cs)

    That's nothing: I once got my modem to show me that I had a 200000 kbps speed for downloading and 0kbps for uploading.

    The download speed wasn't bad, but I can't do anything with zero upload!

  • Look at me! I'm on the internets (unregistered)

    Can we just quit it with the integer wrap-arounds. It's getting boring.

  • diaphanein (unregistered) in reply to Look at me! I'm on the internets
    Look at me! I'm on the internets:
    Can we just quit it with the integer wrap-arounds. It's getting boring.

    Not until you check your overflows.

  • (cs)

    MOM!!! Will ya get off the phone already???? My Blood Elf Warrior is lagging!!!

  • Anonymus (unregistered)

    "I cast magic missile."

    "There's nothing there to attack."

    < pause >

    "I'm attacking the darkness."

  • Carlos (unregistered)

    I'm no DSL expert, but I do know about cablemodems. For 6 years, I had to develop lots of modem monitoring apps, and it means you have to learn more SNMP than you ever wanted to. When you get values like this, it means there were communications errors with some device. So, in this case, you know the values you are getting are wrong, of course the modem does not really have a SNR value like that, but they should warn you that you indeed have a problem somewhere along the line.

  • Chucara (unregistered)

    I've always wondered what an acceptable noise reading was.. Mine is usually 12-13 db, but if he still has a slow connection with a noise level that is audible in Australia, I guess I'm good.

    Seriously though: When should ADSL2+ begin to get unstable?

  • Sparkfizt (unregistered) in reply to lizardfoot
    lizardfoot:
    MOM!!! Will ya get off the phone already???? My Blood Elf Warrior is lagging!!!

    pfft blood elves cant be warriors...

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    Dude, that's pure signal. Its so clear the modem can't even hear it. Do you realize the street value of that wire?

  • Ohnonymous (unregistered)

    The REAL WTF is how you could get -4 out of that.

  • sockatume (unregistered) in reply to Andrew

    "Dude, that's pure signal. Its so clear the modem can't even hear it. Do you realize the street value of that wire?"

    Still not good enough for audiophiles, I'd guess.

  • Cowbert (unregistered) in reply to Look at me! I'm on the internets

    hey at least it's "gracefully" failing possible division by zero (or div by a really really small number)

    captcha: mmmm waffles!

  • Shano (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Dude, that's pure signal. Its so clear the modem can't even hear it. Do you realize the street value of that wire?

    I live in a bodaciously small town, Lane. A fly speck on the map - a rest stop on the way to the ski slope. I can't even get real wire here!

  • (cs) in reply to TGV

    0^214748364.4 times as much, which is more energy than there probably is in the universe...

    Er, yep.

    There are only about 10^86 protons in the Universe. Each proton has about 1GEV of energy, about 1.6 x 10^-10 Joules.

    So if every one of them was converted to pure energy, you're only going to get about 10^76 Ergs. That DB reading is only

    10^214748290 times more energy than that.

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to Ancient_Hacker
    Ancient_Hacker:
    >There are only about 10^86 protons in the Universe. Each proton has about 1GEV of energy, about 1.6 x 10^-10 Joules.

    So there you have it! Proof that our universe is just one of many stacked up against each other. Someone should inform the Discovery Channel straight away.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    Given that that particular unsigned decimal integer is -4 in 32-bit two's complement representation, this should reassure all you guys that it's not uncommon to type printf("%u") where one should have written "%d".

    In fact, I did that just the other day.

    Always nice when it makes it into production code, though. :)

  • all of them (unregistered)

    Instead of whinging about how funny/appropriate the article is, how about you submit better WTFs. If you don't have any, then you have no right to complain.

  • (cs)

    I've seen this, though with a sane connection speed. Usually it's just after pulling up the admin page because the Internet connection has gone wonky and web pages are taking an eternity to load. (It's from a Netgear router, BTW.) Of course, the real WTF is that it's showing the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer.

  • caspian (unregistered)

    those SNRs are great, if impossible. :)

    I'd personally be significantly more worried about the xero line rate...

  • Zargon (unregistered)

    Another fine WTF moment - sponsored by Netgear.

  • Kevin (unregistered)

    Actually, the higher noise margin value, the better! 2.1*10^9 is a bit unrealistic tho.

    I'd say with a NoiseMargin >=7 you should have no problem at all, but if it is <7 your dsl connexion could lose synchronization when you're using halogen lights, or if there's an old elevator in your building

  • DOA (unregistered) in reply to lizardfoot

    hehehe

  • Jethro Tull (unregistered)

    Who TF finds this stuff amusing any more? Why not just change the name of Error'd to Integer Overflow'd?

  • unpro (unregistered) in reply to Jethro Tull

    could it be a thunder and lighting in synch with the data rate?

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to Anonymus
    Anonymus:
    "I cast magic missile."

    "There's nothing there to attack."

    < pause >

    "I'm attacking the darkness."

    "You come across a door half-buried in the sand."

    "I finish burying the door."

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The real WTF is the 0/0 Up/Down speeds.

    No, actually, the REAL WTF is that this wasn't pointed out in the code.

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