- 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
Frist, and TRWTF is Nikola taking a picture of a screen
Admin
Nikola is the nephew from that "Copy Protected" story. That's how he has been taken screenshots ever since.
Admin
"PHP" is the sound of someone surreptitiously passing gas.
Admin
Good to see MS's own dialog windows get screwed by the pointlessly generic AggregateException message.
Admin
No it isn't. It's known as an air gap.
Admin
It's not unheard of that your baggage arrives at all airports, one bag here, one bag there, ... But if you yourself arrive at all airports, I'd be slightly worried. Or they're just advertising their new cloning technology ...
Admin
What does /dev/urandom do on a path?
Admin
I used to know a guy whose luggage routinely went to the wrong airport. As in, like, every time he flew anywhere.
Of course, it might have had something to do with the fact that he tended to fly People Express (the 1980s version). And that was because every time they screwed up, they gave him a free ticket to make up for it.
Admin
Methinks that person, in the search query, asked to see All Airports in Amman, and that is what it's indicating. Not all airports in the world. Not really a WTF if you ask me.
Admin
AMMis the designation for Amman Airport - Queen Alia Airport. Looks like it could be a data entry or OCR SNAFU.FUBAR would be inaccurate as I was able to recognize it.
Admin
The Skype one actually makes sense in a weird way. I believe they switched to using an embedded browser in their latest version which is just a front to their web version. I assumed that was just for the Linux version of Skype, but it's the only thing I could think of that would fit.
Admin
"Frist, and TRWTF is Nikola taking a picture of a screen"
... without a wooden table.
Admin
Clearly Royal Jordanian is using quantum air travel. You simultaneously visit all airports in the world. The flight time is just the time required for the quantum function to converge.
...Or it's the time required for the computer to calculate the exact probability of visiting the desired location.
Admin
But surely for that you will need the Infinite improbability drive, or perhaps even better: Bistromatics.
Yazeran
Admin
"She rides like a steakhouse, but she handles like a bistro!"
Admin
On a quantum mechanical level, you do arrive at all airports. It's only when someone sees you at one of them does your waveform collapse.
Admin
On a quantum level you can either know which airport you will arrive at or when you will arrive at an airport but not both...
Admin
The USPS one is common. Your destination is close enough that it probably gets there in one day no matter how you ship it.
Look at Amazon's Prime shipping. Second-day? In reality it normally goes ground, they are just shipping it from a warehouse close enough to you that it normally meets the deadline. While they occasionally do pay extra (I don't think they were happy the day they had to FedEx a 110# package cross-country!) most of the time all that Prime gets you is your orders are filled before the standard orders.
Admin
A query for "All Airports" in a given city -- is pretty typical [in the US, CHI is the psuedocity code "Chicago - All Airports" [ORD and MDW], NYC is "New York City - All Airports" [LGA, JFK, EWR] and LAX is ambiguous -- it's either the specific airport or "Los Angeles - All Airports" [LAX-the-airport, LGB, BUR, maybe others] depending on context, I think HOU for Houston may be a similar case... But once you move beyond the query and are looking at a specific flight any advisories should be based on that flight's origin and destination, which is most certainly a single airport.
Not a huge deal, even United's front end which has all kinds of other WTFs manages to deal with this gracefully.
Admin
Being too lazy to research it, it's possible that AMM is one of the ambiguous codes where the same identifier is used as a city code (all airports in a city) and airport code (a specific airport). In the US, "LAX" is one case where that applies while "NYC" is a disambiguated counterexample.
Admin
"The USPS one is common. Your destination is close enough that it probably gets there in one day no matter how you ship it."
In which case their system should recognize it and not even bother me with the more expensive option. Thus, still a WTF.
In fact the only way I could think it would warrant both options is if the more expensive one is guaranteed to deliver early — like, early morning, — while the cheaper option will deliver later in the day. Still a lesser WTF because then they should show that the estimated time of delivery for both options is different.
Now I remember one time I bought something in an ebay-like site and the more expensive option's ETA was 2 days LATER than the cheaper option... Wish I had thought of TDWTF then.
Admin
I understand the Visual Studio one. I run into that with my code. It is a standard .Net exception caused be implementing more multi-threading using some of the parallel task functions, such as parallel for / for each or using Parallel LINQ. If you update your previously single-threaded code to do this, which is quite easy to implement by the way, you often forget to update your exception handlers. All the exceptions get wrapped up in a single exception to the host thread and you have to look at the collection of child exceptions to see what happened. Which itself makes sense - you can't have multiple exceptions happening on a single thread. That would be ridiculous.
They just have to go and update their exception handler now. However, it is Visual Studio itself, which makes it a little bit troubling that they did not catch this "basic" .Net thing to do. I know they have been trying to finish getting rid of as much of the COM code in Visual Studio as possible, but it doesn't give me much confidence.
Admin
Back when I was very new to shipping, I paid more to have something shipped UPS Blue - AKA, 2 Day. It got to me in exactly 2 days. The cheaper ground shipping method would have been next day because it was so close. Live and learn.
Admin
Express is a guaranteed service, and you can get a refund if the estimated delivery date is not met.
There isn't a guarantee for Priority mail.
Express also includes a higher amount of insurance, and signature confirmation, in the base fee.
Perhaps this is explained elsewhere on the cropped page, perhaps not. But it's no more a WTF than looking at airfares and seeing that both First Class and Coach travelers arrive at the same time.
Admin
"In which case their system should recognize it and not even bother me with the more expensive option. Thus, still a WTF."
Hm. You pay extra shipping cost. They don't have any extra costs. Thus, they make more money off you. Where's the WTF? Oh yeah, the WTF are those people that pay extra shipping costs because they cannot wait a day longer. :)
Admin
The problem is that express delivery is handled differently. It is handled like a VIP delivery. I once had a job at one of those parcel services unloading lorries in the morning and when an express parcel was spotted, we had to set it aside. It was a guaranteed delivery. Also, where I live our postman has a far too big of a delivery area and often parcels are not delivered but put in the local post office and sometimes we're notified about it. This never happens with any express delivery or premium delivery. There must be some serious consequences if those are messed up. I remember that back as an unloader, my boss, a subfranchisor had to pay enormous fines, far beyond what I made in a week.
So, since it is really something different from normal delivery and people have valid reasons to choose it even when it's not faster, I see little the programmer could have done to prevent this strange looking scenario.
Admin
The more expensive is guaranteed to get there next day or your money back. The cheaper option will likely get there the next day, but could take longer. So, there is a difference in the services, they just didn't bother to describe it.
Admin
Yeah, there wasn't really a "search for all airports in Amman" option on that site - if I recall, you could ONLY specify AMM, which got translated as "All Airports". As others say, presumably confusion between the airport code used for the actual airport and the one used by the whole city - but you'd think that the flag carrier for Jordan would actually know the name of the main airport in Jordan!
Admin
You arrive at Al airports? Like in pieces??