• (cs)

    This is a great bug.

    Nice find.

  • (cs)

    Hmmm. Perhaps they wanted to cope with names like "Fred Smith III" and got carried away?

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    Viva Pax Romana!

    -Captch- "odio" yodel?

  • (cs)

    Not only that it interprets Roman Numerals, but it actually goes up to at least 1000!? Some engineer must really think they made this thing airtight.

  • D2oris (unregistered) in reply to rjmx

    Note that the period behind a number often means "-th" or "-rd". (Don't know the English name for it)

    "20. May", "5. Customer"

  • D2oris (unregistered) in reply to D2oris

    Sorry, forgot to add that that is actually true other languages besides English. German, for instance. :)

  • (cs)

    Seriously: The whole idea of an automated system to call you is rediculous. It may be fine for someone like "Suzanne", but what about foreign names? I'd like to hear it attempt to say my last name which is "Juffermans"...

    Seriously: I'd add an "pronunciation" field to the database which is filled by whoever adds new customers to the system, so you can replace "Pope John Paul IV" with "Pope John Paul the fourth" etc.

    Not so seriously: I don't think the pope gets his books at the Wake County Public Library.

  • sweavo (unregistered)

    Even more often it means that the preceding letter is an initial!

  • Owen (unregistered)

    Could be worse, she could be MILLI M Malone, (if her parentsd were alliteration fans)

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Why does the system interpret initials in the middle of the name as roman numerals? It should only interpret initials at the end, and not up to 1000. That would mean her name has been passed down for nearly 20,000 years!

  • (cs)

    Okay, let's think through this for a moment:

    We'll assume a distance of 20 years between generations, i.e. every Suzanne Malone begat a small Suzanne Malone at the age of 20.

    We'll also assume that the Malones are capable of counting and that the sequence of Suzanne Malones is uninterrupted, incrementing by 1 each generation.

    Thus, in order for this particular Suzanne Malone to be Suzanne M Malone, her family must not only be at least 20.000 years old but also have used the name "Suzanne Malone" for as long.

    Thus I posit that "Suzanne Malone" is the oldest currently used name in existence.

    Edit: Damn, #171162 beat me to it.

  • Crabs (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    Why does the system interpret initials in the middle of the name as roman numerals? It should only interpret initials at the end, and not up to 1000. That would mean her name has been passed down for nearly 20,000 years!

    I can only hope my seed is that strong!

  • M (unregistered) in reply to Chris

    Actually sometimes the numeral is in the middle of the name. For example, the current king of Sweden is Carl XVI Gustaf. (I don't think he borrows books at Wake County Library, though)

  • jtl (unregistered)

    A great example of an rare requirement overwriting a more common requirement because of bad coding.

  • (cs) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    Why does the system interpret initials in the middle of the name as roman numerals? It should only interpret initials at the end, and not up to 1000. That would mean her name has been passed down for nearly 20,000 years!
    Yeah, and besides, when you reach XVI they lop off your head.
  • rick (unregistered) in reply to Owen
    Owen:
    Could be worse, she could be MILLI M Malone, (if her parentsd were alliteration fans)

    Except that the story said she was his wife. So unless they were related before getting married or highly coincidental, Malone isn't her maiden name.

  • Phleabo (unregistered) in reply to D2oris
    D2oris:
    Note that the period behind a number often means "-th" or "-rd". (Don't know the English name for it)

    "20. May", "5. Customer"

    We don't mark ordinal numerals in English with a period, though it is common in other European languages (z.B. auf Deutsch).

    It's a fantastic bug, though.

  • Mil (unregistered)

    I'd hate to hear my name...

    MIL C DILVIC

  • some guy (unregistered) in reply to j6cubic

    And assuming there were no bastards and that we're following standard English naming conventions, every daughter would have to marry another Malone which suggests that we'd be seeing some pretty heavy inbreeding pretty quickly; by the time of Suzanne the 1000th, we should be seeing someone who can count in hexadecimal naturally.

  • (cs) in reply to D2oris
    D2oris:
    Note that the period behind a number often means "-th" or "-rd". (Don't know the English name for it)

    "20. May", "5. Customer"

    It's called an ordinal. i.e. "One" is a number, "First" is an ordinal.

  • (cs) in reply to rick
    rick:
    Owen:
    Could be worse, she could be MILLI M Malone, (if her parentsd were alliteration fans)

    Except that the story said she was his wife. So unless they were related before getting married or highly coincidental, Malone isn't her maiden name.

    Malone isn't even her last name. The article says the name was changed to protect the innocent.

  • (cs) in reply to some guy

    and on one hand

  • Zygo (unregistered)

    http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/functions-formatting.html documents a formatting function for Roman Numerals and does not claim that it is an extension (although it's not clear to me that it comes from the ANSI SQL standard, or is a clone of an Oracle extension).

    Alas, I can't find an inverse of this conversion, which is implied by today's WTF. Looks like they carefully built their own firearm before discharging it into their foot...

  • (cs) in reply to rjmx
    rjmx:
    Hmmm. Perhaps they wanted to cope with names like "Fred Smith III" and got carried away?
    Or more likely, someone decided it would be nice to handle roman numerals at the end of names, and slurped in an existing roman-numeral-to-decimal routine, and didn't bother to limit the placement of the value in the name.

    Bonus points for at least trying to handle every conceivable case.

  • (cs)

    Hey, if you start down the path of applying artificial maximums (e.g., interpreting Roman numerals only up to "IV"), pretty soon you've got a Y2K-like problem on your hands.

    Gotta think of the future. Otherwise you're just like those programmers in the '70's thinking two digits are enough for a year.

  • Matt (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    That would mean her name has been passed down for nearly 20,000 years!

    What's the problem? It's a good name.

  • (cs)

    Handling these ordinals is somewhat over the top. But really, these problems could have been prevented by not giving users a generic "name" field but instead asking for first name and last name and optinal initials and suffix (and maybe title too, to cater for tossers who insist on being called "professor").

  • Jason (unregistered) in reply to j6cubic
    j6cubic:
    Okay, let's think through this for a moment:

    We'll also assume that the Malones are capable of counting and that the sequence of Suzanne Malones is uninterrupted, incrementing by 1 each generation.

    Not necessarily. Look at George Foreman and his sons, George Jr., George III, George IV, etc. 1 generation takes up a few of the numbers.
  • Super Mike (unregistered)

    I guess, never hire a VB programmer in Raleigh. (The library uses VB.)

  • (cs)

    But "fixing" this will cause problems for Pope Benedict XVI. So now I'm just lost.

  • troels (unregistered)

    So you wondered about this for years, without figuring what was going wrong? That puzzles me, because I got it before I reached the explanation. Or is this an artifact from obfuscation.

  • Owen (unregistered) in reply to rick
    rick:
    Owen:
    Could be worse, she could be MILLI M Malone, (if her parentsd were alliteration fans)

    Except that the story said she was his wife. So unless they were related before getting married or highly coincidental, Malone isn't her maiden name.

    It must have been a highly coincidental coincidence. Who'd have thought!

  • MET (unregistered) in reply to Monomelodies
    Monomelodies:
    these problems could have been prevented by not giving users a generic "name" field but instead asking for first name and last name and optinal initials and suffix
    You obviously have never written software that deals with real world names. All you need is one far Eastern name to appear and all these rules are broken. Typically they have three name parts, but sometimes more e.g. "Aung Sun Suu Kyi". One of these is the 'surname' part, but which one depends on which country they are from. China, Japan and Korea (to name but three) all have their own rules, but I don't rate most people's chances of correctly matching names to country convention.

    Also don't forget the Spanish who have two surnames, one each from the mother and father. You can hyphenate them together as in the typical English convention, but they don't like it.

  • Dan (unregistered)

    Don't blame the library. It's more likely that they use a vendor that offers Voice Broadcasting as a service. A message would have typed with merge fields such as "Hello [[first name]] [[last name]] your book is ready". Perhaps before the job was submitted someone just created a field Full name and merged all the fields, or someone put in all the discrete fields in the message.

    Also the vendor may be using another software product to translate text to speech. The software has all sorts of options.

    *I used to be employed by one such vendor of Voice Broadcasting services.

  • Gilhad (unregistered) in reply to rick
    rick:
    Except that the story said she was his wife. So unless they were related before getting married or highly coincidental, Malone isn't her maiden name.
    Not true everytime. At least in my country it is possibile (while not common) that the pair get the name from wife, not man, if both agree with it. Usually it is used, when more known women marry someone common, but this is not the only one possibility. For example my brother did it, because otherwise the the last name of his wife will disapear, while our have more followers (me and my other brother) ...
  • (cs)

    I suspect the program was trying to cope with one method of naming indiviudals after their father. Americans typically use either Jr/Sr or II, III etc. So to cope with the potential for John Doe II, the programmer imported a roman numeral parsing library which probably copes with every roman number possible. And then they didn't bother to check that the code should only parse any text after the surname.

  • KM (unregistered) in reply to JonAxtell
    JonAxtell:
    I suspect the program was trying to cope with one method of naming indiviudals after their father. Americans typically use either Jr/Sr or II, III etc. So to cope with the potential for John Doe II, the programmer imported a roman numeral parsing library which probably copes with every roman number possible. And then they didn't bother to check that the code should only parse any text after the surname.
    Thank you, Captain Late and Obvious.
  • Micah Rousey (unregistered)

    Right when I saw the M. I got it.

    That is so awesome.

    It takes at least a certain level of intelligence to program software... love to see that intelligence go haywire.

  • rycamor (unregistered)

    My first thought on hearing a message like that would be whether I was experiencing a glitch in the Matrix, it just happening to be the 1000th iteration of the 'rycamor' simulation.

  • Weave Jester (unregistered) in reply to wgh
    wgh:
    But "fixing" this will cause problems for Pope Benedict XVI. So now I'm just lost.
    Roman numerals are rarely found in the middle of the name.
  • brian sosmaweif (unregistered) in reply to j6cubic

    It is typically only amongst royalty and papacy that numbers are persistent. Amongst normal folk, it's a way of differentiating between living individuals, thus if Suzanne has a daughter Suzanne, who also has a daughter Suzanne, they are Suzannes I, II, and III. Once Granny Suzanne has passed over, everyone's numeral gets bumped down, so the extant Suzannes are Suzanne I and II (formerly II, and III).

    Now, with a name like Malone, there is a good chance she is Catholic and therefore somewhat fecund, so I suppose if each Suzanne has 10 daughters called Suzanne, it only needs three generations to be alive, which is perfectly plausible.

  • (cs)

    That's odd, Microsoft Sam does it right ...

  • (cs) in reply to Gilhad
    Gilhad:
    Not true everytime. At least in my country it is possibile (while not common) that the pair get the name from wife, not man, if both agree with it. Usually it is used, when more known women marry someone common, but this is not the only one possibility. For example my brother did it, because otherwise the the last name of his wife will disapear, while our have more followers (me and my other brother) ...

    It happens in the States too, but it's very rare. For example, singer/guitarist Jack White of The White Stripes was born Jack Gillis and changed his surname to White when he married his Meg White. In most of the country, changing one's name while getting married is much easier and involves much less paperwork than changing it at any other time.

    Most of the time, if an American woman doesn't want to give up her name upon marriage, both parties keep their original surnames. Sometimes you'll see the two names hyphenated, but you don't see it as much anymore because it can get very awkward if the surnames are fairly long.

  • (cs)

    I remember evaluating a text-to-speech application in the early 1980s. It was smart enough to expand abbreviations. It would read an address of "St. Louis St." as "Saint Louis Street," knowing that the context of the abbreviation was important. I wonder how it would have worked on Susan M. Malone. It seems that the library's TTS software was smart without being intelligent.

  • (cs) in reply to j6cubic
    j6cubic:
    Okay, let's think through this for a moment:

    We'll assume a distance of 20 years between generations, i.e. every Suzanne Malone begat a small Suzanne Malone at the age of 20.

    We'll also assume that the Malones are capable of counting and that the sequence of Suzanne Malones is uninterrupted, incrementing by 1 each generation.

    Thus, in order for this particular Suzanne Malone to be Suzanne M Malone, her family must not only be at least 20.000 years old but also have used the name "Suzanne Malone" for as long.

    Thus I posit that "Suzanne Malone" is the oldest currently used name in existence.

    Actually, according to the official rules of nomenclature (as opposed to the ones which are often, but not always, applied in the U.S.), the Malones must also be nobility, or else there are 999 other Suzanne Malones still living. For non-nobility (or other equivalents, such as the Pope), the official rule is that once you die, you are removed from the numbering system. (So, for example, if John Smith's son is named John Smith II and his grandson is John Smith III, then when John Smith dies his son loses the "II" and his grandson becomes "II".) You can look it up in (for example) Miss Manners.

  • (cs)

    How about this:

    My name will end up with the very contradictory "Glenn the 100th Lasher, Jr."

    It will also mangle some actual names. Consider if someone stateside had a Korean name with "il" in the middle of it. Yep, the former leader of North Korea is Kim the 49th Soong.

    Stupid.

  • Mignon (unregistered)

    Sounds like gold-plating to me. Even if there are three or four people with the same name (and maybe different suffixes) living in the same house, they can surely figure out among themselves which one has the overdue library book. Name parsing isn't very easy.

  • iToad (unregistered) in reply to shadowman
    shadowman:
    Not only that it interprets Roman Numerals, but it actually goes up to at least 1000!? Some engineer must really think they made this thing airtight.

    For extra credit, calculate the square root of pi, using only Roman Numerals.

  • Glo (unregistered) in reply to gabba

    Oye!

    A little BNF grammar construction here could have fixed this. A reasonable state machine for parsing the grammar would not have made this mistake.

    first [middle] last [generation]

    That is NOT rocket science folks.

  • ewww (unregistered) in reply to gabba
    gabba:
    Hey, if you start down the path of applying artificial maximums (e.g., interpreting Roman numerals only up to "IV"), pretty soon you've got a Y2K-like problem on your hands.

    Even if they would have implemented this, somewhere a Suzanne I. Malone would wonder about the strange messages from the library.

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