• null reference (unregistered) in reply to hatterson
    hatterson:
    Fab:
    Chinese should also learn Austria is not a city.
    Austria..heh heh...well then...G'day mate...let's put another shrimp on the barbie.

    We got no food, no jobs... our PET'S HEADS ARE FALLING OFF!"

  • Observer (unregistered) in reply to Stu Dent
    Stu Dent:
    JoLoCo:
    MadJo@Work:
    Hahaha, I hope you were joking. :) Otherwise your teacher might need a class or two more. Austria != Australia.
    Green:
    Note that it is Austria and not Australia.
    You people give geeks a bad name.
    Wow! I got a twofer! Not that I'm surprised. Nobody pays attention to the words anymore. The way things are going I

    Oh, look! Shiny!

    Maybe someone can explain why this is funny? Is mixing up Austria and Australia some new meme that I'm not aware of? Is it as simple as being sarcastic and then laughing at people when they thought you were serious? Am I missing something fundamental here?

  • (cs) in reply to Observer

    It's not a meme, it's just one person attempting a small bit of levity, and having it go way over (at my count) 4 people's heads.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Observer
    Observer:
    Maybe someone can explain why this is funny? Is mixing up Austria and Australia some new meme that I'm not aware of? Is it as simple as being sarcastic and then laughing at people when they thought you were serious? Am I missing something fundamental here?
    It's a retarded meme that came into fashion after the arrest of Josef Fritzl (which was probably the first time that most Americans even became aware of a weird little country called "Austria"). No it's not funny and no its not new but you know how these pathetic memes work. Business as usual.
  • Tom Wilson (unregistered) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    @aka

    I'd imagining, that the square was from a font that didn't support that character. It was probably printed/onscreen and then copied by hand. I doubt that the person copying it gave it much thought really.......

    I love it when people have to explain the joke. :-D

  • null reference (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    which was probably the first time that most Americans even became aware of a weird little country called "Austria"

    Are you kidding? Americans know about Austria because of the hash bars!

  • Rookierookie (unregistered)

    It's true that many Asian fontsets don't have weird characters like ö in it.

    I run Chinese Windows, and I have always had a load of problem with the modified characters used in French, Italian, German, etc. I actually had to go into the game files of Civ 4 to edit a lot of XML strings that were broken this way before the game would run properly.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Tim
    Tim:
    Kibi, mebi etc. were a terrible idea. They're phonetically ugly and sound like very unprofessional. It would be embarrassing to say them.

    That's why nobody uses them.

    Well, not quite. Nobody uses them because they have no place in computer science. Bytes are not base 10, end of story. The ONLY reason this stupid construct exists is so hard drive manufacturers can screw us over. The worst thing about this is that as the size of the drives increase, so too does the size of the "loss" due to the hard drive manufacturers using incorrect values for the size of a byte. And of course, they always incorrectly label their drives in KB, MB and GB instead of the standard KiB, MiB and GiB.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to null reference
    null reference:
    Anonymous:
    which was probably the first time that most Americans even became aware of a weird little country called "Austria"

    Are you kidding? Americans know about Austria because of the hash bars!

    Nice try my friend! Let's see if anyone else goes for it...

  • MRAB (unregistered) in reply to OldCoder
    OldCoder:
    aka:
    Neil:
    @aka

    I'd imagining, that the square was from a font that didn't support that character. It was probably printed/onscreen and then copied by hand. I doubt that the person copying it gave it much thought really.......

    Well, duh, obviously it was a box on their screen. The copying of the box is the part that was either being awkward or trying to be helpful. (as opposed to not recognising the missing character).

    aaaaand if you were a dispatch clerk who had a box to send with a Chinese address on the screen, you'd attempt to copy it as accurately as you could, wouldn't you? I mean, it's not as if everyone in your part of the world knows the Chinese alphabet intimately, is it?

    I don't know any Chinese, but I know it's not an alphabet.

  • Ozz (unregistered) in reply to Hrrruuuuaaaaarrrrrrwwwwlll
    Hrrruuuuaaaaarrrrrrwwwwlll:
    I totally agree... Having different prefixes for binary units is not a bad idea, but those Mebi etc just sound retarded. I will NEVER use them.
    I think you just did...
  • Not logged in today (unregistered) in reply to OldCoder
    OldCoder:
    aka:
    Neil:
    @aka

    I'd imagining, that the square was from a font that didn't support that character. It was probably printed/onscreen and then copied by hand. I doubt that the person copying it gave it much thought really.......

    Well, duh, obviously it was a box on their screen. The copying of the box is the part that was either being awkward or trying to be helpful. (as opposed to not recognising the missing character).

    aaaaand if you were a dispatch clerk who had a box to send with a Chinese address on the screen, you'd attempt to copy it as accurately as you could, wouldn't you? I mean, it's not as if everyone in your part of the world knows the Chinese alphabet intimately, is it?

    aka:
    I originally thought the poor person copying the address down was essentially copying a drawing, much as I would copy down chinese characters, but when you look at it carefully, it was clearly written by someone who had a least a basic idea of english type handwriting. So the box could well have been them being deliberately awkward, or simply having no way of recovering the original character and deciding a rectangle was less confusing than missing it out
    So, what was your point again, Old Coder?
  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Well, not quite. Nobody uses them because they have no place in computer science.
    If anything, it's Mega- and Giga- that have no place in computer science.
    Bytes are not base 10, end of story.
    Then why incorrectly use base 10 prefixes for them?
    The ONLY reason this stupid construct exists is so hard drive manufacturers can screw us over.
    Actually, the construct is an attempt to PREVENT anyone from getting "screwed over", but it's not working because people insist on hanging on to the misuse of a base 10 prefix as an approximation for a base 2 number. And they insist on that because the base 2 prefixes sound unfamiliar and just plain weird.
  • Your Name (unregistered)

    Before reaching for the that vowel key that has that the gaudy decoration dots on it, think about how much ink that wastes. A E I O and U are perfectly understandable. if the o sounds more like an a, then just use the a. please citizens of the planet, think about conservation in this day and age.

    Also, ASCII characters codes after 126 are not officially recognized, and we need that extra bit for parity, or for the reverse character set. There simply is not any room for your ostentatious dotting.

    Besides, it is an immense burden trying to filter all the spam that uses the extra worthless european vowels while trying to convince me to enhance my manhood in its own gaudy, decorative way. Your "enhanced" character set is responsible for all the spam in my overflowing inbox.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    No it's not funny and no its not new but you know how these pathetic memes work.
    Like slapstick comedy and running gags, they work through repetition and variation, i.e. a mix of old and new. To most people, that's funny.

    You may now sneer and congratulate yourself for being much too cultured and intelligent to enjoy that sort of low-brow entertainment.

  • (cs) in reply to null reference
    null reference:
    Are you kidding? Americans know about Austria because of the hash bars!
    I know there's a collection of keys in a hashtable...
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    You may now sneer and congratulate yourself for being much too cultured and intelligent to enjoy that sort of low-brow entertainment.
    I bet you're a riot at parties.
  • IT Girl (unregistered) in reply to Stu Dent
    Stu Dent:
    JoLoCo:
    MadJo@Work:
    Hahaha, I hope you were joking. :) Otherwise your teacher might need a class or two more. Austria != Australia.
    Green:
    Note that it is Austria and not Australia.
    You people give geeks a bad name.
    Wow! I got a twofer! Not that I'm surprised. Nobody pays attention to the words anymore. The way things are going I

    Oh, look! Shiny!

    I was imagining Arnie with an Aussie accent, thank you for that!

  • Oysterman (unregistered)

    Austria vs. Australia, sure why not. I sure can imagine it being hard to tell them apart. Definitely harder then telling Sweden and Switzerland apart, which I to my dismay see being mixed up from time to time (I am a Swede).

    Though I won't blame anyone for this kind of mistakes; I've had some trouble with similarly-named nations myself. Benin vs. Belize, and Togo vs. Tonga. But at least I learn from my mistakes, and I know the difference now: Belize is in Central America, Benin is a fruit, Togo is a piece of clothing and Tonga is a drum.

  • zbe (unregistered) in reply to kastein
    kastein:
    Corrupted zip files are awesome! Kudos to WinZip for correctly handling the Petabyte prefix though... whoever wrote that part of the code was all about future-proofing. anyone want to bet on whether it'll handle Exabytes, Zettabytes, Yottabytes, Xonabytes, Wekabytes, and Vundabytes as well?

    ... I never even knew the last 3 of those existed as prefixes... http://guymal.com/techCorner/powers.shtml. Who gets naming rights on the one after Vundabytes? Following the backwards-alphabet trend, I think it should be named Uberbytes.

    lolwtf:
    The message clearly says they're trying to copy the desktop to the desktop. Obviously they have a huge hard drive, and this created an infinite recursion loop filling it up.
    zbe:
    i'm just glad that i don't have to write a chinese address... that would look like 上海 to me

    [those boxes with numbers that firefox uses for unicode characters]

    Nice example. I see two Chinese characters.
    Same here... firefox 3. zbe, maybe your fonts are FUBAR?

    according to the interwebs nothing is wrong firefox, i just don't have any fonts that can display strange asian languages... they can be installed in control panel > regional and language Options > install files for east asian languages

  • jay (unregistered)
  • jay (unregistered) in reply to Oysterman
    Oysterman:
    Austria vs. Australia, sure why not. I sure can imagine it being hard to tell them apart. Definitely harder then telling Sweden and Switzerland apart, which I to my dismay see being mixed up from time to time (I am a Swede).

    Hey, as long as they don't start confusing your country with France, I wouldn't be too offended.

    Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how Russia invaded Georgia without going through South Carolina.

  • (cs) in reply to zbe
    zbe:
    i'm just glad that i don't have to write a chinese address... that would look like 上海 to me

    [those boxes with numbers that firefox uses for unicode characters]

    wait, how do you know my pw?

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Tim:
    Kibi, mebi etc. were a terrible idea. They're phonetically ugly and sound like very unprofessional. It would be embarrassing to say them.

    That's why nobody uses them.

    Well, not quite. Nobody uses them because they have no place in computer science. Bytes are not base 10, end of story. The ONLY reason this stupid construct exists is so hard drive manufacturers can screw us over. The worst thing about this is that as the size of the drives increase, so too does the size of the "loss" due to the hard drive manufacturers using incorrect values for the size of a byte. And of course, they always incorrectly label their drives in KB, MB and GB instead of the standard KiB, MiB and GiB.

    I've been in the computer business for almost 30 years and I never heard of KiB and MiB until today.

    So yes, using a standard of measure that 1/100 of 1% of your customers have even heard of would be so much more clear and honest than using a measurement that is ambiguous by 2.4%.

  • Neil (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Observer:
    Maybe someone can explain why this is funny? Is mixing up Austria and Australia some new meme that I'm not aware of? Is it as simple as being sarcastic and then laughing at people when they thought you were serious? Am I missing something fundamental here?
    It's a retarded meme that came into fashion after the arrest of Josef Fritzl (which was probably the first time that most Americans even became aware of a weird little country called "Austria"). No it's not funny and no its not new but you know how these pathetic memes work. Business as usual.
    It was also a stupid gag in the movie Young Einstein back in 1988.
  • me (unregistered)

    Please read the following comment:

  • y0da (unregistered) in reply to halcyon1234
    halcyon1234:
    zbe:
    i'm just glad that i don't have to write a chinese address... that would look like 上海 to me

    [those boxes with numbers that firefox uses for unicode characters]

    wait, how do you know my pw?

    hunter2. Simple.

  • (cs) in reply to Oysterman
    Oysterman:
    Benin vs. Belize, and Togo vs. Tonga. But at least I learn from my mistakes, and I know the difference now: Belize is in Central America, Benin is a fruit, Togo is a piece of clothing and Tonga is a drum.
    I confused a sarong with a sari once. It was an embarrassing faux pas. I had to apologize.

    Guess what I said by way of apology.

  • My name (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that K.Bear apparently took a photo of an error screen instead of a screenshot...

  • Michael G (unregistered)

    I know how to spell Australalalalia, I just don't know when to stop.

  • Pestulant (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Anonymous:
    Tim:
    Kibi, mebi etc. were a terrible idea. They're phonetically ugly and sound like very unprofessional. It would be embarrassing to say them.

    That's why nobody uses them.

    Well, not quite. Nobody uses them because they have no place in computer science. Bytes are not base 10, end of story. The ONLY reason this stupid construct exists is so hard drive manufacturers can screw us over. The worst thing about this is that as the size of the drives increase, so too does the size of the "loss" due to the hard drive manufacturers using incorrect values for the size of a byte. And of course, they always incorrectly label their drives in KB, MB and GB instead of the standard KiB, MiB and GiB.

    I've been in the computer business for almost 30 years and I never heard of KiB and MiB until today.

    So yes, using a standard of measure that 1/100 of 1% of your customers have even heard of would be so much more clear and honest than using a measurement that is ambiguous by 2.4%.

    Will Smith will not be happy with you.
  • (cs) in reply to jay
    jay:
    ...using a measurement that is ambiguous by 2.4%.

    You might want to recheck your math.

    Today's HDDs are measured in GB, not KB. At that point, you're looking at a 7.4-7.8% difference (depending on which direction you're measuring). Tomorrow's HDDs will be measured in TB, where the difference is 9-10%.

    (FWIW, I strongly agree with brazzy's post.)

  • Noah (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    I've been in the computer business for almost 30 years and I never heard of KiB and MiB until today.
    Let me guess, salesman at Circuit City??? Please crawl out from under that log and burn it.
  • Noah (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    No, that was the sound of an incestual rapist riding a kangaroo to town to get some Apfelstrudel after a hard day of Opal mining.
    Not much left to mine from Opel these days...
  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Tim:
    Kibi, mebi etc. were a terrible idea. They're phonetically ugly and sound like very unprofessional. It would be embarrassing to say them.

    That's why nobody uses them.

    Well, not quite. Nobody uses them because they have no place in computer science. Bytes are not base 10, end of story. The ONLY reason this stupid construct exists is so hard drive manufacturers can screw us over. The worst thing about this is that as the size of the drives increase, so too does the size of the "loss" due to the hard drive manufacturers using incorrect values for the size of a byte. And of course, they always incorrectly label their drives in KB, MB and GB instead of the standard KiB, MiB and GiB.
    Kids in Black. Men in Black. ... Gerbils in Black?

  • Marvin the Martian (unregistered) in reply to methinks
    methinks:
    No. the manufacturers don't use them because they'd have to build bigger drives (by some multiple of 1.024) while still having to stick to the same size numbers... *very* bad for marketing ;o)
    multiple? No, power. That's the costly thing; a reasonably small power is gargantuan, a reasonably small multiple is reasonably small.
    OldCoder:
    aaaaand if you were a dispatch clerk who had a box to send with a Chinese address on the screen, you'd attempt to copy it as accurately as you could, wouldn't you?
    I read that as "dispatch jerk", which would suit your argument reversely.
  • mpbk (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how Russia invaded Georgia without going through South Carolina.

    Savannah.

  • (cs) in reply to too_many_usernames
    too_many_usernames:
    Gerbils in Black?
    If I wasn't at work, I'd be posting a link to JoeCartoon right now.
  • Sami (unregistered)

    Follow the Instructions Below to Comment

  • James (unregistered) in reply to lolwtf
    lolwtf:
    The message clearly says they're trying to copy the desktop to the desktop. Obviously they have a huge hard drive, and this created an infinite recursion loop filling it up.
    zbe:
    i'm just glad that i don't have to write a chinese address... that would look like 上海 to me

    [those boxes with numbers that firefox uses for unicode characters]

    Nice example. I see two Chinese characters.

    I only see a couple of shady characters.

  • Mr.'; Drop Database -- (unregistered) in reply to Luser Support
    Luser Support:
    As you may notice, the ~6PB is to be downloaded to someone's desktop. So, obviously, some granny upgraded to MSIE 8, went to google, and right-clicked save to desktop. She's making a copy of the entire Internet!
    [image]
  • ÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃ (unregistered) in reply to random.next
    random.next:
    Having an 'ü' in my name, I know the pains of it. Or used to, anyway. Pretty much everything handles it correctly by now. Except for Apple's website. Either it rejects my name right away, or transforms the ü into ü. I don't like Apple.

    A quarter of an Ãpple...yum, yum

    (and I think validus is a wonderful CAPTCHA)

  • ÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃ (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Observer:
    Maybe someone can explain why this is funny? Is mixing up Austria and Australia some new meme that I'm not aware of? Is it as simple as being sarcastic and then laughing at people when they thought you were serious? Am I missing something fundamental here?
    It's a retarded meme that came into fashion after the arrest of Josef Fritzl (which was probably the first time that most Americans even became aware of a weird little country called "Austria"). No it's not funny and no its not new but you know how these pathetic memes work. Business as usual.

    It comes up often, such as: http://www.perthstreetbikes.com/forum/f21/dumb-tourist-questions-5005/ (Yes, I know, it's not true - search for Vienna, though).

    There is also a perception (certainly in Australia) that Yanks struggle to distinguish between Australia and Austria. Whether this is actually true or not, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me (not just from yanks but from the world in general).
    I know when I was at school and people found out I was Latvian they used to ask me whether I could actually speak Latin, so people struggling between Austria and Australia doesn't surprise me.

  • Mate (unregistered) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    Anonymous:
    No it's not funny and no its not new but you know how these pathetic memes work.
    Like slapstick comedy and running gags, they work through repetition and variation, i.e. a mix of old and new. To most people, that's funny.

    You may now sneer and congratulate yourself for being much too cultured and intelligent to enjoy that sort of low-brow entertainment.

    To SOME people that's funny. Maybe even MANY, but I don't think MOST....

  • KP (unregistered) in reply to ÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃ
    ÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃÃ:
    I know when I was at school and people found out I was Latvian they used to ask me whether I could actually speak Latin, so people struggling between Austria and Australia doesn't surprise me.
    Hey, when in Rome, do as the Romanians do...
  • Lego (unregistered) in reply to too_many_usernames
    too_many_usernames:
    Anonymous:
    Tim:
    Kibi, mebi etc. were a terrible idea. They're phonetically ugly and sound like very unprofessional. It would be embarrassing to say them.

    That's why nobody uses them.

    Well, not quite. Nobody uses them because they have no place in computer science. Bytes are not base 10, end of story. The ONLY reason this stupid construct exists is so hard drive manufacturers can screw us over. The worst thing about this is that as the size of the drives increase, so too does the size of the "loss" due to the hard drive manufacturers using incorrect values for the size of a byte. And of course, they always incorrectly label their drives in KB, MB and GB instead of the standard KiB, MiB and GiB.
    Kids in Black. Men in Black. ... Gerbils in Black?

    Nah, Girls in Black!

  • Philipp (unregistered)

    They also spelled the Chinese word for Austria wrong ("Au ta li" instead of "Au di li").

    While we're at it, greetings from Vienna!

  • Gary Olson (unregistered) in reply to Jer Null
    Jer Null:
    Yeah, it starts with a measly 6PB, but by the time the journaling file system gets done with it, and hands it off to the search indexer thingie, we're looking at 14PB minimum. Now let's hope you don't actually try to open it, because that makes two temporary copies even if you don't change anything.

    You forgot 6PB for the cluster quorum.

  • (cs) in reply to Neil
    Neil:
    I'd imagining, that the square was from a font that didn't support that character.
    Another possibility is that the text was being interpreted using the wrong encoding. You often get squares or suchlike, for example, when a UTF-8 decoder runs into an invalid sequence of bytes, such as "ön" in Latin-1. Some decoders replace only the unexpected non-ASCII byte with a square, some eat one or more of the following characters at the same time.

    The reverse problem (interpreting UTF-8 as Latin-1 or similar) leads to "ö" being read as "ö". This easily happens when processing raw text files, CSV or suchlike from one platform on another. For example, I once got a name badge at a conference in New Zealand afflicted with this, except the staff had helpfully removed the paragraph sign and lower-cased the "Ã". I was told the data (from a web form, probably in UTF-8) got messed up when it was imported into Excel (which, in the English-speaking world, assumes CSV is in Windows-1252 unless told otherwise, AFAIK).

  • Subroutine (unregistered)

    The real problem with ä, ö, ü, å etc. is that English uses vowels really randomly, atleast from a Finnish perspective. In Finnish, each vowel corresponds to exactly one sound.

    In English 'a' is different in 'cat' and 'bar'. (The 'a' in cat should be 'ä' instead.) In English 'e' is different in 'green' and 'men'. (The 'e' in 'green' should be 'i' instead.) In English 'o' is different in 'dog' and 'how' and 'moose'. (The 'o' in how should be 'a' instead, 'o' in 'moose' should be 'u'.) In English 'u' is different in 'true' and 'bug' and 'fur'. (The 'u' in 'bug' should be 'a' instead, 'u' in 'fur' should be 'ö'.) In English 'y' is a consonant (should be a vowel, should be used like the german 'ü', can't think of a English example offhand) and is used differently in 'my' and 'you'. ('my' should be written 'mai'.) Funny language :)

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