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Admin
Account Balance: Null Frist
Also I think everyone's out-of-office reply should be turned off. Always.
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I don't see a wtf here ... if you own Bat Out Of Hell then Amazon knows you have terrible taste so it's not a big jump to the Sound of Music. It's perfectly targeted.
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No WTF there: I'm sure there is quite an overlap. The fact that it shows up there is already a good sign. Meat Loaf is fond of rock opera and musicals (remember his role in the Rocky Horror Picture Show?). That's musically quite close to the Sound of Music, even though the themes are very different. More surprising would have been, say, something from Aphex Twin.
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Observation: the "out of office" one is simply the grammar check failing because it can't cope with "mention" that looks like "use". The sentence looks like it is saying "your out of office", but of course in that context "you're" is correct. The submitter might have better luck if he had mentioned the phrase "out of office" rather than using it, i.e. if he had put it in quotes.
Observation: the wireless installation cable is a cable that you use so that you can configure your wireless environment (WiFi passwords etc.) on a computer screen rather than on the two buttons and a blinky light on the printer's front panel. The label looks stupid, but the concept is perfectly sound. (If you've ever configured WiFi on a smartphone, you'll have the beginnings of an inkling of the issues that arise when you configure a printer using two buttons and a blinky light. By all that's holy, I want someone at Orange strung up (hung or hanged, at your whim) for printing the WiFi password in four-character groups when you have to type a string of characters without spaces.)
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C'mon man, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth", and all the others? Terrible taste? Go forth and sin no more.
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This is a logical, coherent and well thought out post giving an credible explanation of an apparent error by a computer system.
What are you trying to do, make everybody else look stupid?
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My bank dongle does this. If you enter the space the key is rejected. But my other bank dongle produces a 10-digit key with no spaces which is hard to copy correctly. There is simply no easy solution when a key needs to be a continuous string but it has to be read and entered by wetware, which has great trouble with any arbitrary string over 6 characters.
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Yeah, that would lead more towards Val Doonican's Greatest Hits, volume 3…
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There is a correct solution - ACCEPT THE DAMN SPACES/DASHES.
It's like bank numbers. The following is a correct fictional Dutch IBAN¹
NL12 BANK 0123 4567 89The following is also a correct representation of that number:
NL12BANK0123456789By the spec, AFAIK, any automated system that accepts the latter but not the former is broken.
[1] The check digit is probably incorrect - I did not bother computing it.
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Or at the very least strip them out in the client before sending to the server! Bad having a message "invalid characters" when it knows full well how to make it valid.
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We have similar in our (PeopleSoft) HR system at work. To specify account details for payroll, we need to provide a Bank,State,Branch (BSB) code and an account number. BSB is a six digit number, sometimes represented with a dash in the middle.
The Peoplesoft database expects it. If you forget to enter the dash, it accepts it as a valid BSB number, but one that is unknown, and thus cannot be used.
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May you rot in that corner of Hell reserved for selective misquoters.
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As long as you don't suggest everyone being out of office should be turned off, I'm ok with that.
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But don't they say in the immediate vicinity of that number that those spaces are there for better human readability only and shouldn' --- Oh, I see. They printed "Discoursistent spaces" in transparent there.
Admin
Time for an old joke.
Only dead people understand hexadecimal.
Oh yes, and you and I, I forgot to count us in.
So that makes only deaf people understand hexadecimal.
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As you know1 which characters are invalid and can damn well eliminate them yourself, you're Doing It WrongTM.
1 discoknow
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Your "correct" solution fails when spaces or dashes are legitimate characters, and if you are using someone else's encoding (like wifi passphrases) you can't retrospectively disallow that.
Edit note - I accidentally hit capslock while typing that so it looked is if I was shouting back at you. But I wasn't, and your post is a good example of when it's wrong to shout - i.e. when the proposed solution ignores all the corner cases.
Admin
Pity you misused "you and I" in an attempt to sound intelligent. Apart from that, not a bad joke, 7/10
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No I did not. "You and I" in the sense "You and I understand hexadecimal." Are you trying to suggest that's it's good grammar to say "You and me understand hexadecimal"?
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I'm not a native English speaker, but I can't find an error in the referred place, neither grammatical, nor semantical. Please enlighten me.
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The implied context is "oh, I forgot you and me, we also understand hex". In that usage, you and I is incorrect
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If that is the implied usage, yes.
I interpreted it as
exactly because of the nominative.
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Wow - an old geek joke I haven't heard before. Not only that, it's a good one! Bravo!
/rob copies it to his jokes list
Admin
The weirdness comes in where "I' would be correct for the latter half of the sentence ("I understand hex"), but "me" would be correct for the former half ("I forgot me/myself"). Replace the first-person pronouns with third person and it's easier to detect: "I forgot her", "She understands hex". No matter which pronoun you slot in, the sentence sounds weird:
"Oh yes, and you and her, I forgot to count you in" "Oh yes, and you and she, I forgot to count you in"
More natural would be "Oh yes, and you two, I forgot to count you in",which works either way you parse the central clause. So going back to our original case, "Oh yes, and us, I forgot to count you and me" would be less ambiguous.
I've probably been :hanzo:'d, my daily standup interrupted me :)
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FTFY
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FTFY - All of us / them are reading the what.thedailywtf.com forum, after all.
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Turns out in this case it was an ambiguous usage from someone who does understand the grammar. Most people tend to just use "and I" even when "and me" is the correct usage
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QFT
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I know Spirit Air is a budget airline, but if they are cutting corners on their software like that, I don't even want to think about what else they are cheaping out on. Not booking with them, thank you.
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And? Did they laugh at your jokes today?
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@Quite did not misuse "you and I". The "you and I" in there is the rest of the split subject, "only dead people and you and I" in the first sentence. The "you and I" part has been split out, but should remain in the nominative case(1).
(1) Well, no, actually "you" is derived from the Middle English oblique (merged accusative+dative) form. The nominative was "ye".
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Unfortunately, it seems we had to make do with @Quite's attempt here, and so only ended up with our daily pendantry.
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Well maybe in college -- but I never inhaled.
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To the MS Grammar Thing's ™ defense, “your out of office should be turned off” is terrible style. I think “your 'out of office' “ or “your out-of-office-notification” would be better options.
Admin
Well, I've read all the comments so far and I think it should be:
oh yes, and you and me; I forgot to count us in.
Although you can argue that "you and I" is correct because it is an extension of the dead people (i.e. "Only dead people, you and I understand hex" where all the people are in the nominative), you can also argue that the second line is a rearrangement of "I forgot to count you and me in" where you and me would be in the accusative.1 (English only has vestigial cases, and the pronouns are examples). So "you and me" because it is really accusative in the context.
The whole problem can be avoided by rewriting:
Only dead people understand hexadecimal. Oh, I forgot to include you and me. So that means only deaf people understand hexadecimal.
I am guessing your native language is German which is perfectly rational other than the tendency to get to the very end of a very long sentence before it is time for the verb to put, so you would not have encountered the principal function of English grammar, which is to provide nitpicks intended to demonstrate one's superiority. In English and Japanese, linguistic usage is about social class and education. (I rely on Japanese contacts to tell me that, I don't know Japanese.)
1 The grammatical problem with the "you and I" being in the nominative is that the words can be read as "Only dead people understand hexadecimal, oh yes, and you and I". In a language with strong cases and weak word order, like Russian, using the nominative would force the association of the you and I with the people. But in English, word order suggests they are associated with the hexadecimal, i.e. only dead people understand hexadecimal, you and I. So it looks wrong. The implication is that the original joke is badly worded because it forces people to analyse case structure - and this is almost never needed in English, which is a participle-and-word-order language.
Admin
We've had [Wireless Cable][1] before. Seems we're still using USB-B...
Filed under: TIL History repeats itself, but with different colors... [1]: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Wireless-Cable "Wireless Cable"
Admin
Yeah -- I wouldn't book with 'em either -- they are known for what's known as "aggressively bad" customer service.
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There is an even more correct solution: accept them if typed, auto-insert them if not. I've seen this behavior in boxes that accept MS product codes, credit card numbers, BSB numbers and Meraki enrolment numbers, and it's been reassuring and convenient every time.
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Seems pretty rare, but makes sense when you know the correct spacing/dashing ahead of time.
In the same vein, my bank's internet banking site automatically switches from the euros to the cents field when you hit the (numpad) period key.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZcGc-nbLco
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Apparently, only dead people truly understand hexadecimal notation. Were I to include you and I in that number, then it would be only be deaf people that could understand it.
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I'm getting this weird sense of deja vu...
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I thought I would rephrase it in a normal sentence (or two) in an attempt to clear up any misunderstandings. Besides, I think it is better - but that is a purely personal and selfish opinion. :)
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This is wrong, as previously discussed. To confirm the correct grammatical structure in this case is simple, just take out "you and":
Oooh, that's bad. Really bad. How about a little cleanup?
That's better. It would probably be better to use "myself", but our end goal is to us "you and {insert first person pronoun}" and who really says "you and myself"? Any way, now we can add "you and" back to get the correct construction:
See, that wasn't so
harddifficult, was it?Admin
TRWTF is XP in 2015. I assume the survey-taker is either extremely old or working for a government agency.
Admin
Just what the frack are you on about?
I too, can read stuff on the internet
My History teacher once made the observation that the United Kingdom and the United States of America are divided by a common language (I was "doing" American History 1775 to 1941). Which, I have since learnt, is a quote by George Bernard Shaw.
My take on that (divided) sentiment is: If it wasn't for us "Brits", you would be speaking French. Actually, come to think of it, we cocked up there. At least, if you were speaking French we would have a legitimate reason to not understand you.