• A Nonny Moose (unregistered)

    1st2WS!st

  • (nodebb)

    Ăý÷ýî

    Secnod, hopefully but I had a hard time entering your captcha.

    Addendum 2026-01-16 07:50: What do you mean that's a one-circumflex, not an i-circumflex?

  • (nodebb)

    My guess would be that it was testing for eight alphas and MarkR only had six.

    To WTFGuy and gordonfish: I replied to your comments in https://thedailywtf.com/articles/comments/a-sudden-tern but I have no way to ping you.

  • (nodebb)

    Ăý÷ýí

    Harder than it should be to use Ubuntu's equivalent of "charmap" to type that, because unlike Windows, you can't construct a sequence in "Characters" and then copy the lot, just single characters.

  • Secret Squirrel (unregistered)

    The service I got for free from the OPM breach was worthwhile - they did not send so many alerts as to be unmanageable, and one of the alerts actually was useful (someone using my information to open a cell phone account, and the service helped to resolve it). The free 10 years ran out recently and I paid for an additional year.

  • (nodebb) in reply to dpm

    My guess would be that it was testing for eight alphas and MarkR only had six.

    My first guess was that they do a unique on the password, which would only be 7 characters.

  • (nodebb)

    This beats Cory Booker," commented nja for reasons I don't begin to understand.

    Nja is referring to Cory Booker's record-breaking speech on the floor of the US Senate lasting just over 25 hours.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    The GNOME "Character Map" app, separate from the GNOME "Characters" that only allows one character at a time, does have a text box and, IMHO, is better and more modern feeling than ye olde Windows Character Map. It even has access to Emoji if one needs it, though I prefer the KDE "Emoji Selector" app for that.

    Addendum 2026-01-16 10:57: On a whim, I did a quick search to see if there is a KDE equivalent, and sure enough, there is: "KCharSelect", which I installed and found is actually really nice. If you want a good character map application, both "KCharSelect" and GNOME "Character Map" do a good job, though the former has more features and I rather dig it's search box so far.

    Addendum 2026-01-16 11:02: And a quick useful tip I just discovered in KCharSelect: If you hold control with the mouse over the description pane, you can control the zoom level there as needed.

  • (nodebb) in reply to gordonfish

    Hey, thanks, that's much better.

  • MRAB (unregistered) in reply to jeremypnet

    @jeremypnet: It asks for the letters and/or numbers. ÷ is neither. A person would know that! :-)

  • (nodebb)

    Most of these friday things are simply indications that there was no or inadequate QA or any kind of testing other than millions of monkeys on typewriters.

  • Klimax (unregistered) in reply to gordonfish

    For emoji and other pictograms and symbols Windows have Emojy Entry. (Win+.) 😊 ÷ (❁´◡`❁)

  • Oracles (unregistered)

    The experian expiration times are correct, if you are a very, very slow reader.

  • (nodebb)

    I think they need to use the unicode Arabic set. Where you can't just charmap your way through it because it's actually a base character plus decorations. Plus the actual shape changes depending on the characters before and after it. Or maybe one of those emojis with attributes you have to get right as well.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Klimax

    That also works in KDE. Looks like Gnome also has something similar.

  • (nodebb)

    Years ago my father received a water bill for $0 (we'd switched to bore water). He ignored it. Then some time later he received a second bill for $0 with a an overdue warning included. He went down to the local office for the water company, asked to pay the bill and said he wanted a receipt. The worker took a look at the bill, then called her manager over, he took a look at it, apologized, then said it wouldn't happen again.

  • Old Timer (unregistered)

    It hardly matters now, but back in the day 'zero balance' payments were the way to get systems to generate 'zero amount' cheques, 000.00, for easy conversion to 1000.00 and no record in the audit or balance sheet.

  • xtal256 (unregistered) in reply to gordonfish

    Just out of curiosity, what does "more modern feeling" mean to you? To me (and probably many others on this site) it means large and unnecessary amount of whitespace, re-written in a more bloated probably web based technology, custom UI with a style that doesn't match the operating system, neglecting to implement basic keyboard navigation and accessibility, etc.

  • Roby McAndrew (unregistered)

    Also years ago a friend got a small refund on one of their utility bills in the form of a physical cheque. Being a busy chap he didn't get round to visiting a bank to pay it in. He then got threatening letters saying if the outstanding negative balance wasn't addressed soon he'd be cut off. Phoning the company confirmed that the only way to make the computer stop was to pay the cheque in and make the balance £0.00

  • (nodebb) in reply to xtal256

    For me it's about taking a decent idea and actually improving on it, rather than just simply reducing it to a sparse UI that is missing a lot of features and feels less intuitive than what came before. I feel it should be about usability, having useful features that didn't exist before, in addition to having a nice - and not overly minimalist to the point of detriment - interface.

    In the case of KCharSelect it's being able to search based on, say, 'a' and getting back a whole slew of variants with varying diacritics and such. Things like that I have never seen in MS Character Map and similar applications. The description pane is great, having information that I would have previous checked elsewhere for, all right there.

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered)

    I think the captcha is legit. They are using non-standard characters but expecting the human to enter the ordinary keyboard version. The thing is OCR is going to produce the wrong version. It can of course be defeated by a transformation but this would work for a while.

  • (nodebb) in reply to gordonfish

    In the case of KCharSelect it's being able to search based on, say, 'a' and getting back a whole slew of variants with varying diacritics and such. Things like that I have never seen in MS Character Map and similar applications. The description pane is great, having information that I would have previous checked elsewhere for, all right there.

    That's probably taking inspiration from the macOS equivalent, which has (or had; I don't know if it's still there in the current version) all the variant selection stuff and so on.

  • xtal256 (unregistered) in reply to gordonfish

    Then that is anything but what passes for "modern" these days. I find that "taking a decent idea and actually improving on it" stopped happening some time around 2010, which is when I realised that often it's better to stay on the older version (except for security fixes). It's why I switched from Firefox to Pale Moon.

  • (nodebb) in reply to xtal256

    I fully understand.l, though it certainly hasn't stopped happening in Linux land.

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