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Admin
Frist of all let me take this opportunity to say, thanks for nothing (and I mean all of it)!
For #3 I wonder, is it 2.25 €uro or Äuro?
Admin
My ISP keeps notifying me of having awarded me zero tickets for their monthly sweepstakes for early payment. So far I have derived zero enjoyment from the zero power bricks and zero electric scooters I have won.
Admin
On that first one, it could just be rounding to the nearest dollar. Are you going to pass up a reward of up to $0.49? (I know I would)
Admin
That seems to be likely another WTF in TDWTF's submission and/or editing system.
Ä is typically encoded as code point 0xC4 in most encodings, but it's encoded as 0x80 in MacRoman. € is U+20AC in Unicode, or 0x80 in Windows-1252, or 0xA4 in ISO 8859-15 (it doesn't appear in ISO 8859-1). The UTF-8 encoding of U+20AC is E2 82 AC.
So, the most plausible explanation I can find is that at some point during the submission process, the text got encoded in Windows-1252 and then decoded in MacRoman to produce that particular mojibake.
Admin
No idea what happened to my € sign :)
Admin
Ah, the perils of copy-paste from Microsoft systems and their Windows encodings. Thanks for pointing that out.
Admin
It seems to be from editing and pasting on both Windows (Windows-1252) and Mac (MacRoman) sides instead of working in UTF-8 all around.
Admin
Fun fact: my first “real” job (before I became a coding ninja) was in a bookstore. We used a DOS-based system to operate the tills (yes this was in the previous century).
For reasons that always eluded me, this system was fine with registering “zero of title X in stock”, but was unable to handle a zero till balance.
So each day started with 0.01 cents of balance, and when counting at the end of the day you had to end with 0.01 cents. I wish I could ask that guy what the hell was going on, but this is almost thirty years ago and he was already old and a heavy smoker, so I fear that chance has passed.