• (disco)

    Pardon my noobiness, I prefer to use built in functions but won't that give you the wrong time in certain edge cases?

  • (disco) in reply to MRAholeDBA

    It depends where you are. If you were in Cairo (Egypt doesn't observe DST) then you'd have the correct results all year round. If you were in Memphis, TN, it would be incorrect all the time.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf

    Memphis is TRWTF - that naming things again.

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    On the other hand, our politicians aren't so smart, the one state on the east coast of Australia which doesn't have DST does shuns it on the basis that it "fade's the curtains" and it "confuses the cows".

    I appreciate the joke, but the real reason they don't do it in Queensland is that solar time in Brisbane is already an hour ahead of Melbourne. In the middle of summer the sun is up for nearly 15 hours and sunset is nearly 9pm. Daylight Savings would make that 10pm. Curtains gonna fade either way.

  • (disco) in reply to Jarry
    Jarry:
    at least in your country it's the same every year.

    We like to change it up for sports because apparently that's the most important thing on the planet:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_Australia#Special_events

    Windows systems, being highly deficient in many areas including timezone handling, did rather poorly.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    It depends where you are. If you were in Cairo (Egypt doesn't observe DST) then you'd have the correct results all year round. If you were in Memphis, TN, it would be incorrect all the time.

    You missed the opportunity for a Memphis/Memphis joke!

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    I've had this happen once where I scheduled a meeting in Perth at 9:00am, only to show up to find some really angry people who were initially quite pissed off that I scheduled a meeting for 6:00am, and even more so when I didn't show up until 9
    And not one of them thought to query the meeting time? I've had this happen where people have scheduled meetings in the wrong time zone, and a simple query of "did you mean time X in timezone B, rather than time X in timezone A?" was enough to sort it out.

    If you schedule a meeting with me at 6am, I'm not going to be there. My obligation to my job does not extend that far.

    caffiend:
    Sorry don't want to derail your thread. but it's 2am and I'm still at work
    I had to call one of my colleagues at 2am this morning to get him to commit his changes so our BI run could complete :)
  • (disco) in reply to anonymous234

    I would not call that a timestamp. 2015-10-28T10:55+07:00 is only a timestamp for the humans, computers have a more robust way to represent the time.

  • (disco) in reply to another_sam

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDXzLeFUkpc

    Wait, this isn't the way to the Temple of Ptah...

    Filed Under: Wrong religious shrine

  • (disco) in reply to another_sam
    another_sam:
    You missed the opportunity for a Memphis/Memphis joke!

    Well, I did choose Memphis deliberately. I could have instead gone for Cairo, IL, but that was just too depressing…

  • (disco) in reply to Olivier_Nicole
    Olivier_Nicole:
    I would not call that a timestamp.

    this is a time stamp! [image]

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Why do people do this:

    Incompetent code flow verification program that takes issue with uninitialised variables? Stupid coding standards that declare everything must be initialised?

  • (disco) in reply to Yazeran
    Yazeran:
    is there some magic autoboxing/conversion in there I'm not familiar with

    Are you thinking that +2 is supposed to add 2 hours? I understand it's just to add a timezone specifier, so concatenating works just fine. There's probably a way to just add it into the format string, but it does work as intended.

  • (disco)

    @antiquarian, @urkerab and @accalia Getting back to the blanket thing...

    1. Cut a strip from the top - choose your own size.
    2. Attach strip to right hand side of blanket.
    3. You should now have an indisputably wider blanket.
    4. Flip the blanket over (reverse side up) - left to right, without rotation !important.
    5. Rotate the blanket 90° clockwise (or clockstupid if you want to keep this in context)
    6. You should now have, by definition, a longer blanket.
    7. Also, as a bonus, the original top (the bit that comfortably smells of you) should still be at the top.
  • (disco) in reply to loose

    ... there's something wrong with that chain of logic.... because i know the conclusion is bunk.... but i can't for the life of me figure out where the proof goes off the rails.

  • (disco) in reply to loose

    "Choose your own size" doesn't work. In order for it (coming from the top side of the blanket) to be the same length as the right hand side of the blanket, the top side of the blanket and right side of the blanket must be the same length, i.e. the remaining piece of blanket has to be square. Cut the top off the rectangle to make it square, stitch it to the side of the square, and it's exactly the same size as before, only sideways. Then you rotate it. It's exactly the same size as it was before, minus the little bit consumed in the seam you added.

  • (disco) in reply to loose
    loose:
    You should now have, by definition, a longer blanket

    Longer than it was wide. Not longer than it was

  • (disco) in reply to anonymous234
    anonymous234:
    having a certain timestamp happen twice.

    The Evil Idea Thread is :arrows:

  • (disco) in reply to PWolff

    Certain timestamps only happen twice if you don't know how to time zones properly.

    Honestly I think it's less likely to break things less severely than having an hour 25 on certain days. We already know how much trouble February 29 causes, and it appears according to a well-defined pattern that hasn't changed since the invention of electronic computers, unlike the beginning and end of Daylight Savings Time.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    less likely to break things less severely

    I don't think that means what you wanted to say

  • (disco) in reply to ixvedeusi
    <this is how much I care>
  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername
    anotherusername:
    Certain timestamps only happen twice if you don't know how to time zones properly.

    Exactly.

  • (disco) in reply to loose
    loose:
    (the bit that comfortably smells of you)
    :giggity:

    Filed under: I think I'm surrounded in things that smell comfortably of me...

  • (disco) in reply to loose

    Suppose that you have a square blanket that is about 80cm wide. That's 6400 cm^2. All you need to do is cut it carefully according to this diagram:

    [image]

    And then reassemble it this way:

    [image]

    Now it's larger. 6500 cm^2, to be precise. Alexander Dewdney of UWO explained the whole thing in the April, 1989 issue of Scientific American but for some reason Arlo Lipof's simple technique for matter fabrication has been ignored ever since.

    Well, except by people who make white chocolate. It is a little known fact that white chocolate isn't really chocolate at all, it's actually a mysterious substance discovered at Roswell as a single wrapped bar which has been used as a source for all of the white chocolate in the world ever since.

    To be honest, it's not that much of a secret. Just look for the words "Made by Banach and Tarski, Chocolatiers" printed on the label.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss

    The diagonal cuts won't quite meet in the middle when you try to reassemble it. That's where the "fabricated" area (8x8 is 1 square unit smaller than 13x5) comes from.

    If the material is stretchy, it could work... but you could also just stretch the blanket to make it bigger without fussing about with cutting and sewing.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    If you're going to try to bring real world considerations and facts into this, then you're never going to make your sales quota.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss
    DCRoss:
    "Made by Banach and Tarski,

    strictly speaking they don't turn 8x8 units into bigger 13x5 units. Instead they turn one unit into almost but not exactly two units (the copy is missing one point, but since it's an infintessimaly small point and you know where it's supposed to be you can just fill it in)

  • (disco) in reply to accalia

    The A K Dewdney article explains that all in more detail. I was just conflating the two different examples for simplicity.

    Speaking of which, I'm having trouble finding a clear copy of that article. SA has it locked up behind a paywall, presumably to prevent people like me from moving to South America and manufacturing impossible spheres of pure gold.

  • (disco) in reply to DCRoss

    Here's a diagram with angles (rounded to the nearest hundredth of a decimal degree).

    [image]
  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    Also, the ratio 3:8 is not the same as the ratio (5-3):5 = 2:5, and hence the pieces in the second picture cannot form a straight diagonal line.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf

    I was wondering why that drawing was being weird. I thought, "Either the two drawings are of two differing shape-sets, or the author is making a very bad assumption for no apparent reason".

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra

    Yeah, basically you end up with a tiny little diamond-shaped sliver of empty space in the middle, with two corners that have angles of 1.24° and the other two corners have angles of 178.76°. Its area is exactly 1 square unit.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    http://i253.photobucket.com/albums/hh49/deepsix13/ahoy-there-captain-obvious.jpg Nice to see that there's no dead horse left unflogged round here!

  • (disco) in reply to dkf

    Yep, that's me [image]

  • (disco)

    And here I was thinking that I had somehow found a simple solution which violated the laws of thermodynamics, could power a perpetual motion machine, and overturned hundreds of years of physics, all based on an article published in a reputable scientific journal on the first of April, discussing the works of someone whose name was an anagram of "April Fool".

    If only there had been some sort of clue somewhere in there that might have tipped me off to the possibility that this could somehow be a less than accurate description of reality then I could have avoided making such a fool of myself by believing in it.

    Thank you for you careful analysis of what I was absolutely certain was a genuine and proven method for creating matter out of nothing using one weird trick discovered by a mom who gets paid $4,232.33 (repeating, of course) a day by Google. Now I understand why doctors hate it.

    Don't worry about me, though. My long lost great-uncle BEN CHRISTOPHER KURUNERI from Zimbabwe has left me a vast fortune and after some minor legal hurdles I will soon be able to claim it all.

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    I think I'm surrounded in things that smell comfortably of me.

    Better than being surrounded by things that smell unpleasantly of my dogs. :dizzy_face:

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    smell unpleasantly of my dogs

    My bitch (usually) smells okay. Need to give her a bath sometime though...

    Filed under: I consider it "nose-accepted" instead of "nose-blind"

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra

    Mine always smell like they need baths. Even when they just had one.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek

    Are you sure they're not ferrets?

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra

    Mine takes a bath all on her own

  • (disco) in reply to Luhmann
    Luhmann:
    on her own
    Ever since our pool ecosystem has reasserted itself, I've had to do it manually. I keep saying that it would be cheaper in the long run to completely replace the water, salt and all, but the man in charge feels otherwise (despite spending well over $2k over the last year trying to remediate it, it's still radioactive green...).
    HardwareGeek:
    Mine always smell like they need baths. Even when they just had one.
    Ah. So, :giggity: then?
  • (disco) in reply to Yamikuronue
    Yamikuronue:
    Are you sure they're not ferrets?

    Quite sure.

    Tsaukpaetra:
    Ah. So, :giggity: then?
    :question:
  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek
    HardwareGeek:
    :question:
    :giggity: Engine hints that something must be going on during the bath if you still smell like you need a bath after the bath.

    I assume you're just not washing with the correct <white/>stuff.

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    having 14 people work on the same issue independently, then justify it by saying "I get an answer faster this way".

    So you bill his department for 14 developers' worth of time.

  • (disco) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka
    Scarlet_Manuka:
    And not one of them thought to query the meeting time? I've had this happen where people have scheduled meetings in the wrong time zone, and a simple query of "did you mean time X in timezone B, rather than time X in timezone A?" was enough to sort it out.

    Yeah, that's a bit of a :wtf: in itself. I regularly have meetings with clients in other time zones, and when arranging the meeting I always specify the time in their time zone, then when I send the meeting request, I set it up for the right time in my time zone, because of just this kind of thing.

  • (disco) in reply to Luhmann
    Luhmann:
    Mine takes a bath all on her own

    I'm pretty sure that breed of dog is known as a 'cat'.

  • (disco) in reply to ScholRLEA
    ScholRLEA:
    Luhmann:
    Mine takes a bath all on her own

    I'm pretty sure that breed of dog is known as a 'cat'.

    My mistakes I didn't know bitch was also a female dog. I never heard it used in that sense.

  • (disco) in reply to caffiend
    caffiend:
    public service announcement.

    Today's date? Oh, it's [image]

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    despite spending well over $2k over the last year

    http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=$2000+worth+of+salt+water

    Uh, that's pretty close to what I meant, Wolfram|Alpha...

  • (disco)
    dkf:
    dead horse left unflogged

    And there was me thinking that we take a rod to our own backs when we use this forum software. [spoiler]You may need to squint a bit whilst looking at the first two words of the quote to get the joke[/spoiler]

    Tsaukpaetra:
    My bitch (usually) smells okay. Need to give her a bath sometime though...

    :giggity: Although :hanzo: by @Luhmann , but it still bears repeating

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