• Tim (unregistered)

    For "They can translate Windows code to run on a Mac, but figuring out a percent discount for an academic license is just a bridge too far," writes Ben S. I guess the real WTF is that this made it here. Initial Value: 173.03 Value of discount: 103.04, which is 59.55% of the original value, which is rounded to 60% Where is the failure?

  • Nicholas "LB" Braden (github)

    Oh god, that "server room" looks like it would set off my allergies in no time flat...

  • Zslatkei (unregistered) in reply to Tim

    Tim asked, "Initial Value: 173.03 Value of discount: 103.04, and Where is the failure?" -- BIG FAT RED $93.16 I guess.

  • (nodebb)

    Math, math never changes. Since the dawn of human kind, when our ancestors first discovered the magic power of credits and debits, blood has been spilled in the name of everything: from sales to profits to simple, psychotic discounts.

    173.03 - 103.04 = 93.16? This must be that new math.

  • devjoe (unregistered)

    The naiveness they are going after includes users who will never notice this word in the URL. Spammers are not looking for us, the TDWTF readers, but for the gullible people who will fall for their tricks.

  • (nodebb)

    ...which in this case would mean Fusion gives 133%.

  • The Vicar (unregistered)

    "Translate Windows code to run on a Mac"? No, actually, they can't. That would be emulation. VMWare is a virtual machine, no translation is going on. Otherwise you could run VMWare on PowerPC Macs. (There WERE X86/Windows emulators for Mac before Macs switched to Intel chips, like VirtualPC and SoftPC. VMWare was not one of them.)

  • Zadkiel (unregistered)

    I've seen PCs like that first picture in Advertising Agencies and other Mac-heavy companies before. My asumption is that the process goes something like this:

    Important client comes to visit the office, asks to use a computer in their reception, meeting room or other public area, and they are all Macs. Client isn't used to Mac and struggles. Sales Director or other higher-up sees this and tells IT to change public computers to PCs in order to be better for visitors to use. IT puts in the crappiest PC they can find, running the worst version of Windows they can find, often also makes it even harder to use by enabling all the worst UI features (colourblind mode, check. mouse trails, check). Partly out of spite for having to sully their beautiful network with Windows poison, partly because they don't want their staff to realise their art-school-fuelled anti-PC mindset is actually baseless. As to the Mac keyboard & mouse, that's some combination of: a) Genuinely all they have in the spares box b) An attempt to make the area look better c) An extension of the crap-PC theory above, deliberately adding to the problems by also introducing a bunch of key mismatches and no right-click.

  • Nicholas "LB" Braden (github) in reply to Zadkiel

    @Zadkiel I actually like pointer trails, I have a tendency to lose track of the mouse and I've found that pointer trails helps negate that.

  • Fred (unregistered)

    The message Mr. Spammer was trying to send was that they have no idea how to spell "naivete"--won't you help a poor fella out?

  • (nodebb)

    Only two emails in SPAM? This guy must be pretty off-the-grid, no?

  • OldPeter (unregistered)

    Computers in ads with wrong attachments? Microsoft Germany once featured an ad (IIRC for MS-DOS 3.5, yeah, last century) where a Commodore Amiga 1200 was "working" as a keyboard for a PC. Every Commodorian realizes this instantly by the keyboard layout.

  • (nodebb)

    Ugh! Why did we have to have that horror show from Felipe R.? This isn't the Halloween edition!

  • devjoe (unregistered) in reply to devjoe

    Hello I am devjoe would someone please explain to me what the joke in the Facebook email was?

  • devjoe (unregistered) in reply to devjoe

    hello im not devjoe but id like to troll a bit too

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to The Vicar

    "That would be emulation. VMWare is a virtual machine"

    A virtual machine is an emulator - of a particular computer system. It may or may not include emulating the processor; if the emulated system is running on a physical system with the same kind of processor, you don't need to emulate the processor if you are able to appropriately sandbox the code running inside the VM from the host machine. VMWare happens to not emulate the processor.

    Aside, what's the deal with what.thedailywtf.com? It's down, anyone know why?

  • The Vicar (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Doesn't change the fact that it's not translating anything.

    Incidentally, it has occurred to me that the FrankenWindows machine at the top of the post, with the Mac keyboard and mouse, might actually be a Mac running Windows XP in VMWare (or other virtualization software like Parallels). For Mac users who infrequently fire up a Windows VM, Windows XP is still very popular — it runs really well even if you starve it of resources within the host OS, you can always do a VM rollback if anything goes wrong with the installation, and if you're only using Windows in a VM to test something which still runs in XP there's no compelling reason to upgrade.

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