• (disco)

    Pretty sure the chat one wanted you to talk about the ease of initiating a CHAT, and the second box wanted to talk about the CHAT itself.

  • (disco)

    I'm impressed by the CHAT questions. Not only do they want to improve your next visit, they want to improve further on the visit after that. They are also avoiding the mistake of fixing two things at once. Clearly a company with a quality procedure.

  • (disco)

    Seven bytes is enough to spell 'database'. Well, it is if you realise that 'database' is seven-bit clean ASCII, and can therefore be compressed using 8-into-7 bit removal - the MSBit of each byte is zero (because it's seven-bit clean), so you can "compress" the 8 characters into 56 bits, 7 bytes.

    Worse: it even works in EBCDIC, although there when uncompressing you must introduce "1" bits rather than "0" bits.

    CDC Display Code complicates matters somewhat by not having a direct representation for lower case letters, but if we change the challenge to spelling "DATABASE" instead, we can do better, by fitting it and two spaces into a 60-bit word, because the characters are six bits each.

    (Lower case is encoded using the 6/12 version, where some ASCII code points, notably the lower case letters, are encoded as "^A" for "a", etc. (Not Ctrl+A, but Caret-A).

    Kids these days, honestly.

    EDIT: For CDC display code, we can spell "DATABASE" using just 48 bits, which maps nicely to just 6 bytes.

  • (disco) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    You might have some sequelae left from the assembly days...

  • (disco) in reply to Sentenryu
    Sentenryu:
    You might have some sequelae left from the assembly days...
    Indeed. That's quite possible. And yes, sequelae is the right word.
  • (disco) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic
    Steve_The_Cynic:
    Seven bytes is enough to spell 'database'. Well, it is if you realise that 'database' is seven-bit clean ASCII, and can therefore be compressed using 8-into-7 bit removal - the MSBit of each byte is zero (because it's seven-bit clean), so you can "compress" the 8 characters into 56 bits, 7 bytes.

    I tried that, but all I got back was "ç♠@Pe╔↑".

  • (disco)

    So Wikipedia vandalism is now acceptable for Error'd submissions?

  • (disco)
  • (disco) in reply to Protoman
    Protoman:
    So Wikipedia vandalism is now acceptable for Error'd submissions?
    Evidently.

    Note to TDWTF editors: any site that allows randoms to edit pages cannot be a candidate for Error'd.

  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    Note to TDWTF editors: any site that allows randoms to edit pages cannot be a candidate for Error'd.

    well, it can, they are the editors, they do get to make that sort of decision. We do however reserve the right to laugh at the submission and otherwise make fun of it.

    ;-)

  • (disco) in reply to Protoman
    Protoman:
    Wikipedia vandalism

    Is that actually what it is, or just some dumbassery?

    A few years ago when Draw Something was popular and they would sell packages of extra colors you could use, they put out a series of "Shades of Red", "Shades of Blue", and so on packages...but "Shades of Grey", oddly, had a completely different name. Something like "Greyscale", IIRC.

  • (disco) in reply to FrostCat

    Yes. It was reverted 7.5 hours later.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shades_of_brown&diff=706647125&oldid=705710318 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shades_of_brown&diff=706712346&oldid=706647125

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Pretty sure the chat one wanted you to talk about the ease of initiating a CHAT, and the second box wanted to talk about the CHAT itself.

    It's wrongly focused, yes. But the WTF is the identical textbox questions.

  • (disco) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic
    Steve_The_Cynic:
    Seven bytes is enough to spell 'database'
    That was my first thought too, but you beat me to posting it :)
  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    RaceProUK:
    Protoman:
    So Wikipedia vandalism is now acceptable for Error'd submissions?
    Evidently.

    Note to TDWTF editors: any site that allows randoms to edit pages cannot be a candidate for Error'd.

    Oh come on, I object! What would we put in the articles? Some of the programmers that create our best stories look to me to be pretty random...and they edited the code.

    For example: do you think it was a good programmer that came up with the code to compute 80% of main memory as 7 bytes? Or is it more likely it was some random loser?

    accalia:
    We do however reserve the right to laugh at the submission and otherwise make fun of it.

    I can't object to that.

  • (disco)

    Eleven?

    That's ridiculous. It's not even funny.

  • (disco) in reply to Quietust

    Yeah, it should say lodlod.

  • (disco) in reply to CoyneTheDup
    CoyneTheDup:
    do you think it was a good programmer that came up with the code to compute 80% of main memory as 7 bytes?

    If available memory == physical memory, then 7B is correct, assuming rounding to the lower byte as makes sense in this scenario (nearest/higher byte could/would result in recommending a value > 80%).

  • (disco) in reply to Dreikin

    Why would they even program that message to work with less than a kilobyte of RAM?

  • (disco) in reply to ben_lubar
    ben_lubar:
    Why would they even program that message to work with less than a kilobyte of RAM?

    I'm guessing the proper question is more like "Why didn't they program it to do something different when the amount of RAM is ludicrously low?". Or maybe they did, but someone put the "more than 80% of available memory" test before the "ludicrously low RAM" test.

  • (disco)

    While the second security concern option is a clear mistake, the others could probably be better named as well:

    • Detection
    • Defection
    • Destruction
    • Deflection
    • Distinction
    • Depiction
  • (disco) in reply to Dreikin
    Dreikin:
    If available memory == physical memory, then 7B is correct, assuming rounding to the lower byte as makes sense in this scenario (nearest/higher byte could/would result in recommending a value > 80%).

    The message:

    Warning: Available memory on the SQL server is 9B. SQL Server max memory is 3MB. Please reduce SQL max memory to less than 80% of physical memory: 7B.

    Even if the available memory was only 9B, the "7B" was supposed to be 80% of physical memory, not available memory. What system do you know that has 9B of physical memory?

  • (disco) in reply to CoyneTheDup
    CoyneTheDup:
    Even if the available memory was only 9B, the "7B" was supposed to be 80% of physical memory, not available memory. What system do you know that has 9B of physical memory?

    I said nothing about that being a sensible memory size - just that if that's what the function was fed as physical memory, it calculated the result correctly. It is also entirely possible that the programmer made the inappropriate assumption I stated above, and treated available memory as physical memory when they are in fact different.

    IOW, I was being a pendant about the calculation not necessarily being wrong given the information provided, and intentionally ignored the other WTFs for that purpose.

  • (disco) in reply to ben_lubar

    Do you know how many times zones there are in the Soviet Union?

  • (disco) in reply to Quietust

    No, but I do know the dwarven word for "one".

  • (disco) in reply to Quietust

    Since the Soviet Union no longer exists…

  • (disco) in reply to Quietust

    Soviet union no longer exists. Russia has multiple (5-6?). China only has one. A large number of south-asian countries are on half-hour UTC offsets.

  • (disco)

    The missed "revenge" as an option for the cybersecurity queston.

  • (disco) in reply to PleegWat
    PleegWat:
    Russia has multiple \[timezones] (5-6?).
    A few more: it’s in UTC +2 through +12.
  • (disco) in reply to Gurth

    Some of them are completely devoid of people, though.

  • (disco) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Go RAD-50 !!!!!

  • (disco) in reply to CoyneTheDup
    CoyneTheDup:
    accalia:
    We do however reserve the right to laugh at the submission and otherwise make fun of it.

    I can't object to that.

    It's OK, soon the front page comments will be separate from the main forum and most of us won't ever visit them again.

  • (disco) in reply to boomzilla
    boomzilla:
    CoyneTheDup:
    accalia:
    We do however reserve the right to laugh at the submission and otherwise make fun of it.

    I can't object to that.

    It's OK, soon the front page comments will be separate from the main forum and most of us won't ever visit them again.

    [poll]

    • And there was much rejoicing in whoville that night.
    • And it was as if millions of voices cried out, and then were silenced at once. [/poll]
  • (disco) in reply to accalia

    You forgot the "What is 'articles'?" option :stuck_out_tongue:

  • (disco) in reply to RaceProUK
    RaceProUK:
    You forgot the "What is 'articles'?" option :stuck_out_tongue:

    It's the thing that currently, I use my RSS reader to tell me that I need to list (or unlist) an article topic. Soon, it will be the thing that I will read after following my RSS reader and never tell anyone about.

  • (disco)

    Any criticism of an error on Wikipedia (or any wiki) that does not include the phrase "and then I fixed it" is itself a WTF.

  • (disco) in reply to Jerry_Kindall
    Jerry_Kindall:
    Any criticism of an error on Wikipedia (or any wiki) that does not include the phrase "and then I fixed it" is itself a WTF.

    You mean "and I fixed it but it got reverted by an admin", right?

  • (disco) in reply to Jerry_Kindall
    Jerry_Kindall:
    Any criticism of an error on Wikipedia (or any wiki) that does not include the phrase "and then I fixed it" is itself a WTF.

    Yep, an indictment of the bullshit internal politics of editing Wikipedia.

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