• Alcari (unregistered) in reply to anonymoron
    anonymoron:
    Anyway, if the sysadmin did it, it wouldn't be in so many languages (or if it was, all the non-roman characters would be translations of 'I can eat broken glass, it does not hurt me'.)
    For all you know....
  • Ann Onymous (unregistered)

    Just wondering ; There may be cultures that makes poor or no difference at all between 'yellow' and 'orange' (not just merely color blind people). So a label in a language that does differentiate may well be necessary. And indeed the photo shows orange AND yellow cables... But I agree that it would have been far more appropriate to label them by their function, not by color...

  • kixx (unregistered) in reply to Kishore
    Kishore:
    Anybody know which langauage each of those lines is written in? I am particularly interested in line 4. 'naranja' is the Telugu (a south-Indian language) word for the fruit orange.

    It's seems to be spanish (from my limited spanish skills)

  • Rick Auricchio (unregistered)

    The Japanese is a transliteration, as stated earlier.

    It says KA-bu-ru o-ran-ji.

    Captcha: burned, as in what happens with the yellow/orange fiber mixup?

  • xevious (unregistered) in reply to blodulv
    blodulv:
    The Korean may actually be a WTF within a WTF; it's actually "orange cable" in English:

    O Ren GEE Sek Cae EE buhl

    Isn't this how most oriental (chinese,korean,japanese,...) languages work?

  • Ether (unregistered)

    This is just as useless as:

    // add 1 to a
a++;
  • Aunt Debby in Hawaii (unregistered)

    Not only that, here's what the Korean says:

    "O-Ren-Gee sek [sek="color"] Kay-Bul"

    So the only Korean word in the whole phrase is the one for "color." The rest are just transliterations of the English words.

  • WillP (unregistered) in reply to guy
    guy:
    They should have just made one super luxury stall instead.
    HILARIOUS!
  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Incidentally, trying to enforce language by decree has never been very successful. For example, in World War I, German authorities asked people to say "Pfefferfleisch" instead of the Hungarian loan-word "Gulasch" (from gulyás). I never heard anyone use this word.
    Except that is, in France. Some scholars jokingly say that French should be called a constructed language rather than a natural language. For a hilarious recount of this story I recommend Jelle Noorman's "De haan op de mesthoop". In this book Jelle Noorman, a true francophile, details all kinds of curiosities about France, French and the French. From the intricate convolutions of the Académie Française, to culture and history. I had a big laugh, so if you can find an English translation somewhere (if such a thing exists) don't hesitate to buy it. And about the Japanese text (which I didn't notice due to being preoccupied with the German text), the word オレンジ is used a lot for orange, even though for example 橙色 exists as well. As for ケーブル, this word, also a straight borrowing from English, is standard in Japanese. The strange order (and absense of particle) strikes me too, but then again, I've seen things like "cable, orange" as well. Perhaps some other poster can enlighten us?
    anonymous coward:
    xevious:
    For those of us who have no clue about language patterns in general (because we only know basic English), could you explain what inflections are, because otherwise your post is as meaningless as the one you are trying to explain.
    You're assuming me or Shinobu wanted you to understand, while we were actually just showing off our knowledge about the German language.
    Of course! I really get a kick out of throwing words like "inflection" on unsuspecting innocents. :-)
  • (cs) in reply to cezio
    cezio:
    it's hungarian notation for networking
    I think it's more like 
    #define TEN 10
  • (cs) in reply to xevious
    xevious:
    blodulv:
    The Korean may actually be a WTF within a WTF; it's actually "orange cable" in English:

    O Ren GEE Sek Cae EE buhl

    Isn't this how most oriental (chinese,korean,japanese,...) languages work?
    What, the ones that don't have words for "orange" (adjectival) and "cable" (nounal, and quite possibly derivative in some form, since the English version is clearly a nautical reference)?

    Perhaps you're thinking of the specific "small citrus fruit resembling the orange" flavour of Chinese. (My thanks to Google for that obvious translation.) The Tibetan would presumably be "big testicle-shaped thing that you peel and then suck on, but we don't see many of those up this high, so we're not sure what colour it is."

    The bizarre thing here, to me at least, is I looked at the Korean and thought, "That just has to be wrong. Many thanks to the posters who have pointed out just how wrong it is. My knowledge of Korean extends around about far enough to recognise the script, and understand faintly how it is constructed.

    I mean, "O Ren GEE (tonal inflection, just to complicate matters) Sek Cae EE buh?"

    What's wrong with just saying "Danger, Will Robinson!" in Korean? It's probably a better translation...

  • Jorge (unregistered) in reply to Kishore
    Kishore:
    Anybody know which langauage each of those lines is written in? I am particularly interested in line 4. 'naranja' is the Telugu (a south-Indian language) word for the fruit orange.

    It's Spanish even when I will expect to see "cable anaranjado" instead of "cable naranja" (and yes, Spanish is my natural languaje)

    Captcha tacos (prefiero unas empanadas, con un buen vinito)

  • (cs)

    Does the red cable come with a "Wrong cable" label?

  • kaekae (unregistered) in reply to WillP
    WillP:
    guy:
    They should have just made one super luxury stall instead.
    HILARIOUS!

    Not really hilarious. That is what they did in some of the bathrooms at my work. 1 stall per bathroom. thankfully nto all of the bathrooms are like that.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Rick Auricchio
    Rick Auricchio:
    The Japanese is a transliteration, as stated earlier.

    It says KA-bu-ru o-ran-ji.

    I didn't even look closely enough to notice that the Japanese text is all Katakana. For the unaware: Katakana is a Japanese phonetic alphabet that is only used for foreign loan words. For Japanese words, Kanji and Hiragana are used. However, I think it's not that improbable that in Japan, both orange (the color) and cable are actually expressed as English loan words if the traditional language did not contain such words. Consider that the industrialization of Japan started in the Meiji era, where the government hired over 3000 foreign advisors (from about 1874 to 1899), many from Britain and the USA. So, should "cable" (kaburu) be an English loan word, this would not be so surprising. Japanese does have a native word for orange (the fruit), which is, incidentally, 橙色 (let's see whether the forum software supports Unicode, he), but I don't know whether it's used to describe orange (the color), too, as in Chinese (see below).

    The following line is a bit suspicious, too: If you take away the second Kanji, Babelfish translates this as "orange wiring" from simplified Chinese. But I have no idea what the second Kanji, which stands in between the two Kanji for "orange" is supposed to mean.

  • tgies (unregistered) in reply to Rick Auricchio
    Rick Auricchio:
    The Japanese is a transliteration, as stated earlier.

    It says KA-bu-ru o-ran-ji.

    Captcha: burned, as in what happens with the yellow/orange fiber mixup?

    No, it says "ke-bu-ru o-re-n-ji".

    Andrew:
    It is true that Japanese places adjectives before the noun. In fact, every adjective also verb conjugations; there is no "to be" construct.

    Dude, yes there is. It's in like every third sentence one might say, too. "desu"/"da"/"de arimasu"/"de aru".

  • SarahEmm (unregistered)

    This cable is likely from an EMC SAN. EMC seems to label the fibre that comes with a CX SAN installation like this, all the cables have the colour labelled on them (with exactly this label). The 'Red Cable' (at least the cable labelled as such) is currently black! I think this is so the documentation doesn't have to be updated whenever they change cable vendors/models...

  • tgies (unregistered) in reply to tgies
    tgies:
    No, it says "ke-bu-ru o-re-n-ji".

    with the ー after the ケ making it read "kee".

  • Simon (unregistered)

    I have seen those cables before. They are the optical cables for the Dell SAN setup that we have at my work. Being a "student employee" I have seen TOO MANY labels... :P

  • chuck (unregistered) in reply to Simon

    Brilliant! Leuchtend! Brillante! 華麗 화려한 精采

    (captcha: dubya)

  • Marcel (unregistered) in reply to anonymi
    anonymi:
    That means that "orangenes Kabel" is not correct in German language. It simply doesn't make many sense:)
    Granted, I've only spoken German since... hmm, birth basically, but that's exactly how I would say it. And probably pretty much everybody else in the south. "orange kabel" OTOH, while perhaps technically correct, sounds like something our Turkish fellow citizens might say.
  • jam (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    The second one means "yellow"; so the phrase in Chinese translates as "orange yellow colored connecting string" (chén huáng sè jiē xiàn) or, in better terms, "orange cable" Note that I've rarely seen "orange yellow" used; usually, we simply use "orange color" (chén sè).

    CAPTCHA: yummy (just like the cable)

  • jam (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Rick Auricchio:
    The Japanese is a transliteration, as stated earlier.

    It says KA-bu-ru o-ran-ji.

    I didn't even look closely enough to notice that the Japanese text is all Katakana. For the unaware: Katakana is a Japanese phonetic alphabet that is only used for foreign loan words. For Japanese words, Kanji and Hiragana are used. However, I think it's not that improbable that in Japan, both orange (the color) and cable are actually expressed as English loan words if the traditional language did not contain such words. Consider that the industrialization of Japan started in the Meiji era, where the government hired over 3000 foreign advisors (from about 1874 to 1899), many from Britain and the USA. So, should "cable" (kaburu) be an English loan word, this would not be so surprising. Japanese does have a native word for orange (the fruit), which is, incidentally, 橙色 (let's see whether the forum software supports Unicode, he), but I don't know whether it's used to describe orange (the color), too, as in Chinese (see below).

    The following line is a bit suspicious, too: If you take away the second Kanji, Babelfish translates this as "orange wiring" from simplified Chinese. But I have no idea what the second Kanji, which stands in between the two Kanji for "orange" is supposed to mean.

    The second "kanji" (chinese character) is yellow. This is the only language on the list to qualify the cable as both orange and yellow (well, technically, in Chinese, specifying both would simply mean orange). I'm not sure why they did this, as the usual 橙色 works just fine for Chinese speakers AFAIK, but 橙黄色 doesn't seem to work so well. Meh.

  • (cs)

    The Daily WTF has become a WTF breeder.

    German (the language) is a great big WTF all by itself. Just google Mark Twain "Awful German Language".

  • Morty (unregistered) in reply to mmahler
    mmahler:
    Who here can tell me what happens if you wire a multi mode transceiver to a single mode transceiver? I'll give you a hint, the magic smoke escapes and and you need to replace the transceivers at both ends. Fiber optic cables are sometimes labeled as orange cable or yellow cable even if the actual color of the cable is gray or black. This isn't a WTF?!?
    That makes a lot of sense, actually. An installer who learned about "yellow" and "orange" cables and who has been working for years with only "yellow" and "orange" cables might never have learned (or may have forgottten) that the real distinction is singlemode vs. multimode. So if you have a black cable labelled as "multimode", the installer may be confused. Whereas if you have a black cable labelled "multimode orange", then the installer can proceed regardless of how he/she was trained. I've never seen a cable labelled like this, but given human nature, it makes sense.

    Although I have to say, I've had grey multimode cables (with MIC termination for FDDI!) for 10+ years.

  • Cairnarvon (unregistered)

    "The Japanese is a transliteration, as stated earlier.

    It says KA-bu-ru o-ran-ji."

    ケ is ke, not ka (which is カ). It says keiburu, which is closer to the English pronunciation.

  • (cs) in reply to Kishore
    Kishore:
    'naranja' is the Telugu (a south-Indian language) word for the fruit orange.
    It's also Spanish for orange.
  • Frost (unregistered) in reply to Kishore
    Kishore:
    Anybody know which langauage each of those lines is written in? I am particularly interested in line 4. 'naranja' is the Telugu (a south-Indian language) word for the fruit orange.

    Actually, it's also Spanish, which is far more likely to be the language used than a south-Indian one. "Cable naranja" is a pretty suspicious phrasing, too.

    As someone pointed out, the katakana is actually a (painful) transliteration of "cable orange," too.

  • (cs) in reply to texdex
    texdex:
    mmahler:
    Actually.... There is a very good reason for this. Orange and Yellow, are two colors that are very difficult to differentiate for color blind people. Now I'm assuming that most of the commenters on this haven't worked with fiber cable much. Orange is usually used for multi mode. Yellow is usually used for single mode.

    Who here can tell me what happens if you wire a multi mode transceiver to a single mode transceiver? I'll give you a hint, the magic smoke escapes and and you need to replace the transceivers at both ends. Fiber optic cables are sometimes labeled as orange cable or yellow cable even if the actual color of the cable is gray or black. This isn't a WTF?!?

    Perhaps the real WTF is that it's possible to wire it up wrong and damage equipment like that. If it's really that dangerous to do then there should be different cable types that are not mutually interchangeable.

    I'm still trying to work out how connecting up optical cables incorrectly causes damage. Worst case scenario is you've got two lights pointing at each other. Whoopee. It's not like pointing two flashlights at each other damages them.

    Or does fibre mean something else in this context that I am missing... ?

  • Out of order (unregistered)

    So who made that out of order label, was it EMC san or Dell san?

  • cc (unregistered)

    As you all are pointing out, the real WTFs are the translations!

    I am assuming "cable naranja" was supposed to be spanish, but that would mean "cable orange" in english as they are both nouns. Think some kind of long orange that acted as a cable or something. Should have been "cable anaranjado" methinks.

    The Japanese, while not wrong, reads like "Cable: Orange" (notice the dot in the middle) which is completely unlike the other translations. The use of the english loanwords is correct.

    What cracks me up is that if you use babelfish to translate "orange cable" you seem to get the correct translations, so how did this label wind up so whacked?!

  • (cs) in reply to anonymi
    anonymi:
    That means that "orangenes Kabel" is not correct in German language.

    ... orange kabel - orange cable mit orange kabeln - with orange cables

    Are you're sure, that "(ein) orangenes Kabel" is wrong at all? I'm not completely sure about that, it looks a little bit strange but this is noting uncommon in languages. Maybe "(ein) oranges Kabel" would be correct. Here is an other colour as an example: "(ein) grünes Kabel" - "(a) green cable"

    But "mit orange kabeln" is definitively not correct. It should be "mit orangenen Kabeln", since "Kabeln" is plural and therfore "orange" has to be changed into "orangenen". If looking at another nice colour again, it's the same: "ein grüner Frosch" - "mit grünen Fröschen" ("a green frog" - "with green frogs")

    Pretty confusing sometimes, my beloved German language.

    And now don't ask me, what I want to do with hundreds of green imaginary frogs jumping around in my mind.

  • EPE (unregistered) in reply to Jorge

    Well, while "cable anaranjado" is technically better than "cable naranja", nobody here in Spain uses the word "anaranjado"; you must be from Latin America, aren't you?

  • Thorsten (unregistered) in reply to dev_null

    Just checked my "Wahrig" (last edition before the Rechtschreibreform). You can decline grün, but not orange. But you can say "orangenfarbenes Kabel".

  • (cs) in reply to Marcel
    Marcel:
    anonymi:
    That means that "orangenes Kabel" is not correct in German language. It simply doesn't make many sense:)
    Granted, I've only spoken German since... hmm, birth basically, but that's exactly how I would say it. And probably pretty much everybody else in the south. "orange kabel" OTOH, while perhaps technically correct, sounds like something our Turkish fellow citizens might say.

    Actually, as a native german speaker, I say "oranges Kabel" (maybe because I am from the sorth) and to Hell with the "correct" version - the latter just sounds plain wrong to me.

    As for the turkish citizens and residents, most of them are now second or third generation citizens and residents and tend very much to speak German as a native language. So they probably make the mistakes we "ethnic" germans are making, anyway.

  • Izzy (unregistered)

    It's like trying to compare oranges and...oranges.

    BTW, the red cable under my desk is labeled "Cut here to disarm bomb."

  • John (unregistered) in reply to Alcari
    Alcari:
    Why not stamp the cable with A,B,C??

    Why have two naming schemes for the same set of categories? It will make the documentation more complex and confuse people. There's absolutely nothing WTF about that image. The whole story is a non-story. People like you amuse me because you assume that anything you read on this site must be a real wtf and join in the bashing in the comments. Google on the "Milgram Experiment" to see what I'm talking about.

    The real WTF is that this site has gone to sh*t as Alex has sold out and you're too hypnotised to realise it.

  • Kevin (unregistered)

    i think it's a pair of optical fiber owned by Orange (the operator)

  • Will (unregistered) in reply to mmahler

    Erm, rubbish, you can't blow up a fibre transceiver by using the wrong patch cable. It'll either not work or not work very reliably.

  • Random832 (unregistered) in reply to mmahler

    That's not a good reason. That's a good reason to label them "Multi Mode" and "Single Mode". Not "Orange Cable" in seven different languages.

  • Random832 (unregistered) in reply to Quinnum
    I'm still trying to work out how connecting up optical cables incorrectly causes damage. Worst case scenario is you've got two lights pointing at each other. Whoopee. It's not like pointing two flashlights at each other damages them.

    They're not flashlights, they're <dr_evil>frikkin' lasers.

    captcha: muhahaha</dr_evil>

  • (cs) in reply to Kishore
    Kishore:
    Anybody know which langauage each of those lines is written in? I am particularly interested in line 4. 'naranja' is the Telugu (a south-Indian language) word for the fruit orange.

    Spanish. 'Naranja' is cognate with 'orange', 'oranje', 'arancia', etc. (the 'n' comes, I believe, from the phrase 'una aranja' - 'an orange').

  • (cs)

    Something like 7% of the population is color-blind in one way or another.
    A few years back I did some consulting for a small company that thought they had hit the jackpot-- they wanted to patent color-coded buttons, one color for "E-mail", another for "web", etc.

    I had to inform them that: (1) Color coded buttons were patented by DEC, for their VT-xxx series of terminals. You couldnt use their text editor without a special "gold key" to invoke commands with.

    (2) Many people are color blind.

  • (cs) in reply to blodulv

    it's not a wtf within a wtf, it's just common to take english words and translate them phonetically because (not that english is a universal language) most products that are used worldwide are in english anyway, so their respective names should be in english as well... by your logic, we should have more wtf for having words like "kindergarden", "resume", and "knapsack"!

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to jam
    jam:
    The second "kanji" (chinese character) is yellow. This is the only language on the list to qualify the cable as both orange and yellow

    Ok, since this is Chinese, I should have callied it a hànzi.

    Anyway, thanks for identifying another Real WTF(tm): The oranyellowge cable. ;-)

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Marcel
    Marcel:
    I've only spoken German since... hmm, birth basically

    Seems like you were a bit precocious back then.

  • dolo54 (unregistered)

    You total jerks! This picture is from the server at the school for the colorblind! God some people are so insensitive!!!

  • Jean Naimard (unregistered)

    This could be funny on the surface. But many moons ago, when I was the resident RS-232 cabling “expert”, once my boss summonned me to the dinosaur pen, with an obvious grumpyness in his voice.

    Wondering what I did wrong this time, I found him with several cow-orkers staring at an opened DB-25 connector. He points to me at a wire, and angrily asks me “which colour is that wire???”.

    — Green, I say.

    — Thanks, he said, obviously relieved and no longer pissed-off (he wasn’t pissed at me), and proceeded to shove the wire in a hole. “I’m colour-blind”, he added…

    Now this explained why, several months ago, when he asked me to make a huge 12 RS-232C cable with a 100 pair cable between two floors. At one end, I shoved the wires pairs in the proper DB-25 connectors, without taking notes of the colours used.

    — You don’t take note of the colours?

    — No need for that.

    He left, muttering bad omens for me for when “the cable would not work”.

    For the other end, I simply fashioned a tester with a sp8t switch, a battery and a DB-25 connector that sent a signal to the various RS-232C pins, signal that I picked with a buzzer at the other end. When he saw that, he freaked-out, by obviously being pissed at not having thought of it.

    When he said, months later, that he was colour-blind, I understand now why he was so pissed-off at my method to make cables…

    (CAPTCHA = gotcha!)

  • Dave C. (unregistered)

    "Patrick McGoohan"? You mean he's "The Prisoner"? In that case, I would have expected a beach ball or giant bicycle to be labeled "Orange cable." Of course, if this is instead a reference to "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055929/, then, um, well I have no idea, really.

  • (cs) in reply to Jean Naimard
    Jean Naimard:
    I found him with several cow-orkers
    How do you ork a cow?

Leave a comment on “Which Cable?”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article