• Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    Erik:
    Personally, I'm just confused about what the hell the OfficeMax chart is trying to tell me. Magic be damned, what the hell is this?

    Block size, maybe?

    I'm guessing the top row is supposed to be in MB not GB, and it's telling you the approximate number of pictures that can be held on a card of each size.

    I don't know of many cameras that can save 24GB RAW images, but my camera is around 10MB per image when saving as RAW.

  • NZ (unregistered) in reply to Kensey

    It could also have been a SUBST drive. I've run into some products where MSI does not like SUBST drives.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subst

  • Plastic Man (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    Erik:
    Personally, I'm just confused about what the hell the OfficeMax chart is trying to tell me. Magic be damned, what the hell is this?

    Block size, maybe?

    I think it's supposed to be the number of files that will fit on a flash memory card, given the file size and the card size. But the chart is just WAY out of whack no matter which way you look at it.

  • StDoodle (unregistered)

    The plotter WTF is fairly common; a lot of large-format printers (especially older models) have hard-coded margins in them, which can't be exceeded in any software-only way. Trust me, I've been forced to print my share of 1:0.99 scale drawings. :(

  • coog (unregistered) in reply to Nibh
    Nibh:
    I love hard-wired wifi. It's capable of gigabit transfer rates, is harder to eavesdrop on, works better in densely populated areas, and is less susceptible to electromagnetic interference. Where's the WTF?
    Must visit Pembroke Inn. Not only do they have a wired wifi, but a free-hard one.

    Or is that something perverse I don't want to know about?

  • Goo (unregistered) in reply to re:me
    re:me:
    Fenris:
    The one about the pump, shows software flexibility, not a WTF, broken printer in pump 13, redirect ticket to pump 14.

    The one about V:\vs8, if V is a mapped driver, the installation directory can be larger than the limit, and still show as V:\vs8

    So, 2 non WTFs

    Swiping your card at one Point of Sale and having the receipt print at another simply isn't a good thing. In fact, i'd wonder if it meets PCI standards.

    It probably does, because the receipt shouldn't have enough information to identify you or your credit card. You can display the last 4 digits of a card all you want, and store them in plaintext if you want to

  • (cs) in reply to Fenris
    Fenris:
    The one about the pump, shows software flexibility, not a WTF, broken printer in pump 13, redirect ticket to pump 14.

    The one about V:\vs8, if V is a mapped driver, the installation directory can be larger than the limit, and still show as V:\vs8

    So, 2 non WTFs

    I hope I never have to use any software you wrote. If the path is really too long, it should tell you in some way that the fully-qualified version of the path that you've mapped to V:\vs8 is too long. It shouldn't say that a 6 character path is too long. So it is most definitely a WTF!

  • re:me (unregistered) in reply to Goo
    Goo:
    re:me:
    Fenris:
    The one about the pump, shows software flexibility, not a WTF, broken printer in pump 13, redirect ticket to pump 14.

    The one about V:\vs8, if V is a mapped driver, the installation directory can be larger than the limit, and still show as V:\vs8

    So, 2 non WTFs

    Swiping your card at one Point of Sale and having the receipt print at another simply isn't a good thing. In fact, i'd wonder if it meets PCI standards.

    It probably does, because the receipt shouldn't have enough information to identify you or your credit card. You can display the last 4 digits of a card all you want, and store them in plaintext if you want to

    True, but it still seems wrong to me to intentionally print my receipt where someone else may pick it up. At the very least, it could deny me a receipt.

  • (cs) in reply to re:me
    re:me:
    Fenris:
    The one about the pump, shows software flexibility, not a WTF, broken printer in pump 13, redirect ticket to pump 14.

    The one about V:\vs8, if V is a mapped driver, the installation directory can be larger than the limit, and still show as V:\vs8

    So, 2 non WTFs

    Swiping your card at one Point of Sale and having the receipt print at another simply isn't a good thing. In fact, i'd wonder if it meets PCI standards.

    I've spent way too much time staring it the PCI-DSS spec. As long as they aren't stupid enough to put more than the last four digits of the card number on the receipt, or any other data from the magnetic stripe on the card, then it's not an issue. If they are stupid enough to put sensitive data on the receipt, then they're in for a world of rediculous requirements, like installing anti-virus software on the embedded OS of the pump.

  • (cs) in reply to Jaime
    Jaime:
    re:me:
    Fenris:
    The one about the pump, shows software flexibility, not a WTF, broken printer in pump 13, redirect ticket to pump 14.

    The one about V:\vs8, if V is a mapped driver, the installation directory can be larger than the limit, and still show as V:\vs8

    So, 2 non WTFs

    Swiping your card at one Point of Sale and having the receipt print at another simply isn't a good thing. In fact, i'd wonder if it meets PCI standards.

    I've spent way too much time staring it the PCI-DSS spec. As long as they aren't stupid enough to put more than the last four digits of the card number on the receipt, or any other data from the magnetic stripe on the card, then it's not an issue. If they are stupid enough to put sensitive data on the receipt, then they're in for a world of rediculous requirements, like installing anti-virus software on the embedded OS of the pump.
    But on embedded systems that don't have a file system...

    oh the hell with it

  • Worf (unregistered)

    I've seen the open box one a lot. It happens because the item goes on sale, so the tag is updated (it's changed weekly), but naturally, they don't ever reprint the open-box tags.

    That being said, you can either pay the sale price, or if you ask the guy nicely, he'll take the discount for open box and apply it on the sale price. So if they took 20% off the first time, he'll take 20% off the lower sale price.

    Requires asking nicely though. A skill most people don't have.

  • (cs)

    Msiexec DOES resolve the UNC path of the mapped network drive, because it doesn't necessarily run as the user account or in the desktop session that is running the installation (in case of Remote Desktop or elevated installations). That also means that msiexec does not necessarily know about the existence of the mapped drive. 1320 is a common error, not only for VS2005. This behavior was changed after Win2000.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    It took me a while, but the chart shows how many pictures you can store on a memory card. RAW is the format used by cameras (you can see cameras on the left and right side of the picture), and the numbers along the top are supposed to be MB, not GB. You can hold 320 10 MB RAW pictures on a 4 GB memory card, according to the chart.

  • Why (unregistered) in reply to smbarbour
    smbarbour:
    the most flexible form of their own API, which would allow a maximum path length of 32,767 characters (instead of the standard form with a max of 256 characters)
    Now that we have multiple gigabytes of RAM, not to mention obscenely large disks for swap space, why oh why oh why do you programmers keep setting maximum lengths of anything??!!! There shouldn't be a buffer overflow, or any other kind of maximum string length, or memory limit, until my hard drive is 100% full.

    OK, slow down if you must, but don't tell me you can't handle a few hundred characters when I've given you a few billion characters of space. When I ask you to do something, do it, don't argue. ** Slap! **

    What, you learned how to do it this way in second grade, and never reconsidered your design patterns now that we have abundant and cheap hardware resources?

    I mean really, WTF???

  • Dan (unregistered)

    Reminds me of a gag gift box that claims to have a USB-powered toaster in it.

  • sino (unregistered) 
    var i;
shenanigans();
  • Guillermo (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    Isn't it fairly obvious that it just has some powered USB slots, like for charging your iPod while you BBQ or something? It doesn't seem like a big deal, but hardly a failure by any means....

  • Outtascope (unregistered) in reply to A Gould
    A Gould:
    sd:
    That picture of Pembroke is clearly doctored, because there's no Tim Hortons in the background.

    It is entirely possible to have a Canadian picture without a Tim Hortons in it.

    Usually, it's because the Timmy's is immediately behind you.

    What a stereotype. I'll bet you would be hard pressed to find more than 4 Tim Horton's in a two mile radius of that hotel.

    Besides, Canada is just ahead of the U.S. All #$%#$ing restaurants in Canada are Tim Horton's now. (Jean Spartaneaux, you are fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality statute eh).

  • Bobble (unregistered) in reply to Worf
    Worf:
    I've seen the open box one a lot. It happens because the item goes on sale, so the tag is updated (it's changed weekly), but naturally, they don't ever reprint the open-box tags.

    That being said, you can either pay the sale price, or if you ask the guy nicely, he'll take the discount for open box and apply it on the sale price. So if they took 20% off the first time, he'll take 20% off the lower sale price.

    Requires asking nicely though. A skill most people don't have.

    I am entitled to them getting it right the first time and at a price I deem acceptable. They are violating my human rights and compromising my freedom of expression by making me have a civil conversation with a price-gun jockey. Hell, I shouldn't even have to pay for it. If I want it and like it, they should have a Paypal account where I can donate $5.

  • Brad (unregistered) in reply to Erik
    Erik:
    Personally, I'm just confused about what the hell the OfficeMax chart is trying to tell me. Magic be damned, what the hell is this?

    Across the top the file sizes should be in MB. It's trying to show how many pictures you can fit on a memory card for a given file size (RAW pictures are uncompressed large files from SLRs or high end point and shoots).

  • itsme (unregistered)

    IIRC, I once ran into serious problems with VSS and mapped drives. Some weird incompatibility with, very specifically, mapped drives pointing to Novell storage clusters. Took some time to get to the bottom of that one.

    And, yes, I am painfully aware that TRWTF was VSS. It was the best we managed to argue for at the time. Hell, when I joined, the PHB hadn't even implemented version numbers, never mind source control...

    Things are better now.

  • Jason (unregistered) in reply to Guillermo
    Guillermo:
    Isn't it fairly obvious that it just has some powered USB slots, like for charging your iPod while you BBQ or something? It doesn't seem like a big deal, but hardly a failure by any means....

    What it really needs is an FTP site so I can fax some recipes to it.

  • (cs) in reply to Guillermo
    Guillermo:
    Isn't it fairly obvious that it just has some powered USB slots, like for charging your iPod while you BBQ or something? It doesn't seem like a big deal, but hardly a failure by any means....

    And where is this power coming from? A propane generator?

  • Tim McCormack (unregistered)

    What you're looking at in the YouTube screencap is a JSON response protected by an infinite loop. If some malicious site manages to execute the JSON response in an attempt to steal data, it will hang forever. Extremely clever.

  • Fred (unregistered)

    The USB port is to charge your cell phone. There is a peltier device just under each burner.

    I don't know why they need 3 USB ports. It seems like more than one is wasteful.

  • ScottL. (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Trying to rationalise the USB port on the BBQ...

    It can warn you when it's running low on propane. It can warn you when your steak is getting too well done. It can tell you that it's time to flip your burger. It can piggy back your internet connection and order more of whatever it is you are cooking and have it delivered to your location. It could interface with google maps, infa-red subsystem, which could zero in on your BBQ's exact location via an internal GPS, and provide accurate food-temperature readings. It can be infected with malware which would raise (lower) the temp and burn your dinner (give you botulism). You could replace your Win-BBQ OS with *nix-BBQ because real chefs BBQ with *nix!

    It could tweet your dinner menu to the rest of the intertubes.

  • somedudenamedbob (unregistered)

    I love these. Some of the best Friday WTFs in a while. I definitely want that magic flash drive. The ESPN one is a great find, and one of the most believable WTFs, contrast with the youtube WTF that anyone with firebug could have done. How did they manage to get the pump printing to a different pump, and was that an easier fix than just replacing the printer? And obviously, the USB ports are where you hook up your cooking robots. One for ribs, one for burgers, and one for buns.

  • (cs)

    I assume the grill is Windows compatible, which is fine for beef, chicken, fish, even corn on the cob.

    But if you want to grill penguin, you need a *nix grill.

    And permission.

  • (cs) in reply to somedudenamedbob
    somedudenamedbob:
    How did they manage to get the pump printing to a different pump, and was that an easier fix than just replacing the printer?

    All the pumps are connected to the attendant's station. When a printer runs out of paper the UI tells you to go talk to the attendant so they can print out a receipt for you.

    I'm guessing that two printers are broken... the one with the sign, and the attendant's. As a temporary software fix while they wait for the hardware guy to go out and replace the printers, some clever network tech figured out how to get the pump to print on the adjacent printer.

  • someguy (unregistered) in reply to badcaseofspace
    badcaseofspace:
    Msiexec DOES resolve the UNC path of the mapped network drive, because it doesn't necessarily run as the user account or in the desktop session that is running the installation (in case of Remote Desktop or elevated installations). That also means that msiexec does not necessarily know about the existence of the mapped drive. 1320 is a common error, not only for VS2005. This behavior was changed after Win2000.

    This ^

    It all depends on if and how the path is resolved in the software.

  • Sir Read-a-Lot (unregistered)

    First part of comment goes here. Second part of comment goes here.

  • Ian (unregistered)

    I've stayed at that Best Western. The only thing nearby is the County of Renfrew offices. The "hard-wired WiFi" at the time was a RJ-45 jack on the wall. You were better off hijacking REAL WiFi from the county offices.

    Captcha: eros - The last thing on my mind in Pembroke.

  • Jean-Paul Shenanigans (unregistered)

    "I'd call Shenanigans", yeah, do you know how many #&&#**-ing phonecalls I get every day from people who hear this? Why can't the call Smith, or Jones, or someone with a more common name...

  • Brendan (unregistered)

    Hotel Rated 3-5 Stars = Hotel Rated (-2) Stars

    Obviously, on a scale from 1 to 5 a score of (-2) isn't very good. It's no wonder their wired wifi is "free-hard".

    -Brendan

  • Flan (unregistered)

    Don't forget to ask for a Wifi cable at the reception.

  • The Wanderer (unregistered) in reply to ContraCorners
    ContraCorners:
    I almost missed the line about hard-wired WIFI because I was too busy trying to figure out why they were bragging about being rated somewhere between 3 and 5 stars.
    It's simple enough.

    They've been reviewed multiple times (whether by different people or by different publications or just on different occasions), and some of the time they were rated as low as 3 stars, but other times they were rated as high as 5.

    Yes, they could ignore the lower ratings and just tout their 5 (or 5s), but that would be less honest and might confuse potential customers who had read a review with a lower rating (or even put them off, because they think the 5-star rating is a lie) - so they report the full range of ratings.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle

    There was a thinkgeek april fools usb powered foreman igrill. And then they came out with a real one: http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/25/george-foreman-busts-out-the-igrill-for-reals/ In this day an age, it actually wouldn't surprise me if they had a usb port for charging a mp3 player or something. Though its still a better WTF than a gas station's printer being broken. Could the submitter really not imagine what kind of error could break a printer?

  • (cs) in reply to NSCoder
    NSCoder:
    I prefer my barbecues with firewire.
    Yeah, USB can't handle steak.
  • CPFC (unregistered)

    But everyone knows BBQs don't have a file system

  • (cs)

    That grill has 3 more USB ports than the iPad.

  • (cs)

    I've seen that Youtube error too, digging through their scripts. It actually gets returned to a Javascript function under certain circumstances, which will blindly execute it. I don't see what purpose it serves other than to effectively crash the browser with a tight infinite loop.

    Youtube Error Handling: if something goes wrong, fuck up the user's stuff as much as you can.

  • skeptical hippo (unregistered) in reply to Veritass
    Veritass:
    The reason the BBQ is discounted is because it only has USB 2.0. I am waiting for this year's model to come out with USB 3 before I bother getting one. My BBQing requires the additional throughput.

    This is essential if you're going to hook up your bbq to the hardwired wifi. However the USB speed will only be the bottleneck on 5-star days; on 3- to 4-star days it will be retarded due to the lack of a Tim Hortons in the promotional photograph.

    Additional statement to complete recomposition of popular article idioms.

  • (cs)

    I see somebody let go of their end of the micro-analysis of the pics, so I've decided to toss in my $.57 - The alert box that is obviously a simple message has an option to Cancel. How does an embedded filesystem on firewire attached to a propane generator handle a Cancel? Poor head , it feels like it will asplode!

    Or else that's just Brillant. Get the user to handle their own cancel-action, in a tight loop!

    (too over the top? I knew I should've scaled back at some point)

  • Xythar (unregistered) in reply to Henning Makholm
    Henning Makholm:
    The logo to the left of the BBQ monstrosity is that of the Australian Gas Association. Down there it is not "just in time for summer".

    Yeah, I thought that was rather a strange thing to say.

  • caleb (unregistered) in reply to lolwtf

    It's to prevent other sites from using their JSON data.

    AJAX has cross domain rules which would prevent that data from being read by other sites. But the same doesn't hold for script tags. So by prefixing all your messages with while(1) you prevent another site from being able to use script tags to get your data. (Using a cross site request forgery attack)

    Here's an example:

    http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2007/01/gmail-xsrf-json-call-back-hackery.html

  • Nick (unregistered) in reply to Brad
    Brad:
    Erik:
    Personally, I'm just confused about what the hell the OfficeMax chart is trying to tell me. Magic be damned, what the hell is this?
    Across the top the file sizes should be in MB. It's trying to show how many pictures you can fit on a memory card for a given file size (RAW pictures are uncompressed large files from SLRs or high end point and shoots).
    OK, but why does it specify RAW files? A 10MB RAW file is exactly the same size as a 10MB JPEG or a 10MB TXT file.
  • Details (unregistered)

    Come on, pay more attention, guys!

    It's not "free hard-wired wifi", its "free-hard wired wifi". That's something completely different!

    Greez, really!

  • STarLite (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Trying to rationalise the USB port on the BBQ...

    It can warn you when it's running low on propane. It can warn you when your steak is getting too well done. It can tell you that it's time to flip your burger. It can piggy back your internet connection and order more of whatever it is you are cooking and have it delivered to your location. It could interface with google maps, infa-red subsystem, which could zero in on your BBQ's exact location via an internal GPS, and provide accurate food-temperature readings. It can be infected with malware which would raise (lower) the temp and burn your dinner (give you botulism). You could replace your Win-BBQ OS with *nix-BBQ because real chefs BBQ with *nix!

    It could tweet the temperature of your current steak.. every 5 seconds! Tha would surely add to your follower count!

  • Mayhem (unregistered) in reply to Nick
    Nick:
    Brad:
    Erik:
    Personally, I'm just confused about what the hell the OfficeMax chart is trying to tell me. Magic be damned, what the hell is this?
    Across the top the file sizes should be in MB. It's trying to show how many pictures you can fit on a memory card for a given file size (RAW pictures are uncompressed large files from SLRs or high end point and shoots).
    OK, but why does it specify RAW files? A 10MB RAW file is exactly the same size as a 10MB JPEG or a 10MB TXT file.
    Because a RAW file is going to be the largest possible image the camera can create, whereas if a camera supports JPEG and RAW, the JPEGS will naturally be smaller for the same image. They were trying to market the card to people who know the difference.
  • Mayhem (unregistered) in reply to Maurits
    Maurits:
    somedudenamedbob:
    How did they manage to get the pump printing to a different pump, and was that an easier fix than just replacing the printer?

    All the pumps are connected to the attendant's station. When a printer runs out of paper the UI tells you to go talk to the attendant so they can print out a receipt for you.

    I'm guessing that two printers are broken... the one with the sign, and the attendant's. As a temporary software fix while they wait for the hardware guy to go out and replace the printers, some clever network tech figured out how to get the pump to print on the adjacent printer.

    This is more interesting than it seems - on the pumps I used to support, the printer is a very very cheap and basic device hardwired to a given pinpad. Each pinpad communicates with the banking network independantly of any others around it. Connecting a printer to multiple pinpads would be asking for trouble, as they aren't clever enough to queue print jobs so when the station got busy ... The attendant gets sale information from the pump controller, which is a completely different system. Usually the only things an attendant can do to a pump is start/stop/release and change prices. The receipts they can reprint will not include any banking transactions at all, only total price and quantity of fuel sold.

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