- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
"Why are there holes in this fence?"
"They're knotholes, sir."
"Yes they are, I can put my finger right through them!"
Oh, and I am also reminded of the person who went into a shop to buy some booze but was refused because he wasn't 21. "Yes I am," he said, pointing to his date of birth on his license. "No you're not," retorted the cashier, "you're 23. My boss told me I can only sell alcohol to people who are 21."
Admin
Was the email of-fence-ive?
Admin
The WTF on the circle calculator is that although 3/8 doesn't count as a positive number, 0.375 does. More to the point, if you just enter "a", it makes the same complaint.
So, it's a bad error message combined with an incomplete number-parser.
Admin
The fence is from Gmail's themes options, named "Wood" by iStockPhoto. But if he didn't have that set as his theme, then it's strange that it ever got downloaded and displayed for him.
Admin
I have a strong suspicion that their obfuscation went figure and some functions got called that weren't supposed to. Different versions of the scripts, one with previous obfuscation, another with newer one.
Addendum 2021-05-21 09:07: *went crazy
Admin
My mind first went to spreadsheets: if you enter 3/8 into a spreadsheet program, you get a date—March 8 or August 3 depending on locale. And unless they've invented some new math recently, I don't think you can take the square of a date and get a positive number back.
Admin
I wood think emailing a fence would be a felony, but only a board person would post that.
Admin
It's not necessarily parsing as a date. It's just not parsing and solving the division operation. The same result happens with "3+8", "3*8", or "8-3". The textbox expects a number, not a mathematical expression.
And why should it? It's an area of a circle calculator, not an area of a circle and general expression calculator.
Admin
I often get emails that give me wood...
Admin
What's wrong with a circle with negative radius? You guys fixated on Euclidean geometry or something?
Not to mention
Admin
I'm aware. I didn't mean to imply that Google was parsing it as a date (that would be a pretty weird thing to do here), just that it reminded me of how automated date detection in spreadsheets can mess you up when you're not intending to enter a date.
Admin
There is, however, a reasonable exception - it is user-friendly to accept 3/8 as if it's a fraction rather than as if it is a non-number.
And in any event, it's a stupid message. It wants a positive number, but complains that what you enter must be positive. I entered positive, and it still insisted that what I enter must be positive.
(Yeah, I know, use versus mention, but ...)
Admin
Strong agreement here. It is not WRONG not to support different number formats, but the error message is clearly misleading.
Admin
Besides the question, if Google's error message may have been due to poor parsing, the message is entirely insane: why would the sign matter at all, if the variable appears in the formula only once as a square? (Is this how you successfully guess how many eggs fit into a skyscraper?)
Admin
Am I really the only one who saw that and said "Wooden Table!"
Admin
Wooden surprise me. But it's paling into comparison with some posts I've seen.
Admin
"Boomer Eric D. accidentally shares the prototypical Gen X experience,"
You destroy the world we have to live in, we destroy you.
'Nuff said.
Admin
It's sort of sensible, up to a point, maybe, to insist that the entered radius is non-negative (word to the wise: "non-negative" is not a synonym for "positive"(1)). After all, it is the radius of a circle, and circles aren't often of negative radius. The concept of the area of a circle of zero radius is a bit weird, but it is well-defined.
The message itself, on the other hand, is the equivalent of a web server dumping a PHP or Perl or Java stack trace back to Joe or Jane Public. It has skipped past the essential point - the user must (but did not) enter a number, with fractions expressed as decimals and the number written in Arabic numerals (no, "xlii" is not interpreted as equivalent to "42") and gone on to analyse the number itself.
(1) Zero is neither positive nor negative, but it is non-negative.
Admin
Wow, so now we're joining the boomer hate train. I really didn't expect the writers of the site to stoop this low, but am I really surprised? This new guy Lyle Seaman isn't terribly funny or creative, he's just arrogant. At least the written stories have a degree of humor in addition to the arrogance that comes with running a site dedicated to making fun of anything, but this idiot doesn't even afford us that. No idea why they hired this fool.
Admin
No hate. That was just a fact (and I'll cop to the 'arrogant' epithet). He's just a smidge too old to be a Gen X'er. I sincerely apologize to anyone else who was offended by the label "boomer". Note: To clear this from the moderation queue, I did edit the apparently intentional misspelling of my surname, but I imagine that anyone who grew up after the invention of Porntube is probably bored by it. It wasn't terribly funny or creative.
Admin
To be fair, you did use the full term "Baby Boomer", which has been around long before the shorter form became an insult.
Admin
That was an edit, xtal, to avoid drawing the further wrath of Mr. Tool's cohort. While no insult was intended, I did indeed use the briefer idiom initially. Now, let's all just get on with discussing my other failures, shall we?
Admin
You're all right mate. It's just a word. It amazes me that there are people who get all bent out of shape by specific terms used for the purpose of categorisation, yet on the other hand are completely unfazed by the divisive lines of thought that lead to the resentment of those particular categories in the first place. Just think how much happier people would be if there were not such rampant inequality in society, and none of that poisonous thinking that if a person is ill or poor, then it must be because of a moral failing of theirs. Hey, you never know, sort that out and you may find you don't need to wear a gun to Mothercare in case you need to protect yourself with it.
Admin
Okay, folks. You can slag off me, you can slag off the other staff, but I'm drawing the line at directly ripping into other commenters. It is a fine line, and it is subjective. I may let some oblique references slide but harsh words directly targeted against specific community members are going to be removed. Take that stuff to Facebook.
Admin
What's there to be amazed about? It's just common sense. The elites want the rest of society to be divided so that they can't rise up and demand economic and political equality. So they produce wast amounts of propaganda to convince people words, phrases and various other things are divisive in order to ferment social discontent aimed at one another instead of them.
Admin
I immediately thought "wooden table," but then realized a table is just a fence lying on its side.
Admin
I see what you did there. ;)