@Buttembly Coder said:
If there is a problem that keeps the site from showing, just show the user a big, friendly :-(
Why would a pictogram of a suction cup be associated with a site-loading problem?
@Buttembly Coder said:
If there is a problem that keeps the site from showing, just show the user a big, friendly :-(
Why would a pictogram of a suction cup be associated with a site-loading problem?
@blakeyrat said:
I don't use FF, but Chrome manages to do that just fine without an always-visible status bar.
If it's not always visible, I don't think it is a good status indicator. A status indicator should require nothing more than moving the focus of my eyes.
I suppose you might argue about what things are best put in an always-visible status indicator, but that's a different argument than the concept of an always-visible status indicator.
@Ben L. said:
What's the problem there? It sorts all the solid bits out perfectly!
@boomzilla said:
The slippery slope fallacy is bullshit.
Yes, I can see how that would be slippery. Even better is the fact that it may be dried and crusty so not seem slippery. Then something gets it wet and then everyone is at the bottom of the pile covered in sludge wondering WTF just happened.
@Zecc said:
I pasted that into an editor with a different font to check if the prefix was LOLS. I was disappointed.
Sans-serif fonts are TRWTF?
@PJH said:
It is a trackpad. It's an Apple Magic Trackpad.
I just love wireless I/O devices forrrr
Ah, fresh batteries! Anyway, I was saying, I just love wireless I/O devices on my desktop!
The only thing that sort of concerns me about a "new" forum is the infinite-scrolling nonsense.
I hereby post a challenge if we go that route: someone turn it into a Möbius strip.
No funny story here, I just got the saying from a colleague yesterday and thought it quite appropriate to these forums.
So, although not funny, I guess I can at least provide a story: We did have a situation like this, where my company used a third-party supplier to fill a gap in our product line-up, despite almost all of engineering saying "here be dragons." Two years later, and we have mostly made it through the dragonfire holocaust as we find the thing we bought wasn't as fit-for-purpose as we thought, and had lots of undocumented limitations, resulting in much conflict with our customers to whom we sold the thing... So now we are rolling our own version of the product with a very compressed timing plan and late to market...
@Ben L. said:
Apparently my dwarves have discovered the secret of making roasts out of four minced non-minceable non-roastable ingredients.
You can most definitely roast flour, with heat and/or insults, as preference dictates.
Ben - why don't you just reverse-engineer the save files?
@Maciejasjmj said:
What if you need both the 32-bit and 64-bit version of the application? And other applications on your system depend on one or the other version?
I thought we learned the lesson that associating file / path name with a particular attribute (e.g., bit-width, file content type) was a WTF many years ago.
@flabdablet said:
It has a three cylinder 660cc motor...It's fun to drive
Each cylinder of the engine on my car has that displacement...we must have very different definitions of "fun to drive."
I think you guys have missed my point. First, it's not our application that is having problems*, it's the third-party tools we use. Heck, some of the old versions still fall over if you have spaces in pathnames, so it's not just the issue with 64-bit. (We actually had to install DOSbox to get an old compiler to work properly. Madness.)
Second, if the old "32-bit" way of doing things was "Folder A", it's an idiotic decision to say "going forward, new 64 bit things are in 'Folder A' and we're going to start putting 32 bit things in 'Folder B' " - why would you force old stuff to move, instead of putting new stuff in a new place?
Third - why would 64-bit and 32-bit stuff need to be in different places anyway? That is - why would a folder location convention even be established for such a thing? This is arguably the main WTF in my mind.
*Our "application" is code for an embedded device, which is micro-controller specific - so our "apps" are just .a files for our target. They don't have any relation to what the host operating system bit-width.
@JoeCool said:
Under C:/Program Files(x86)...
I love how Micrsoft decided to muck up everything with their transition to 64-bit. Putting all old 32-bit code in a place that used to be called "Program Files" suddenly in "Program Files(x86)" and all the 64-bit stuff in "Program Files" is a good one.
My company is suffering right now through Windows 64 bit transition issues... yes we're a little late to the party, but we develop embedded code, and some of those development tools do not like 64-bit... they're just now getting transitioned over. It's also fun now that we have to support not only a dozen versions of third party tools, but now both their 32- and 64-bit versions! Yes, part of the WTF is we don't just say "sorry we no longer support third party tools from 7 years ago."
As an end user, I should not care if I'm installing or using a 64-bit or 32-bit application! I should not have to do anything special to install a 32-bit versus 64-bit application. The OS should make that transparent to me!
@cdosrun said:
Let's call in "Annual" (for per year), "Failures" and to add an extra level of precision (Since most drives don't have this batshit high number of failures) "Per 100"
That way, we have 120 in the AFp100 column instead of 120% in the Annual Failure Percent column.
This is probably the least ambiguous notation I've seen so far.
@DaveK said:
No, they think that there are legitimate arguments that the probability of an event per unit time can exceed 1.
If you're tralking about probability density function, I agree, but that's an instantaneous value - you can't shouldn't use it for as long a period as a year. Integrating the pdf over any interval must be less than or equal to one: "the probability I'll have n drive failures within T time" is always less than or equal to one.
People thinking there are legitimate arguments that the probability of an event can exceed 1...
To what depths have I sunk!? I think I may have executed my first moderately successful troll post...
People thinking there are legitimate arguments that the probability of an event can exceed 1...
It's no wonder we live in a world where people and governments can't balance their budgets.
@boomzilla said:
@AFR on Wikipedia said:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annualized_failure_rateIt is a relation between the mean time between failure (MTBF) and the hours that a number of devices are run per year.
So, no problem with 120% AFR with a small enough MTBF. It just gets a little weird intuitively with a short enough MTBF.
They apparently (ab)used the approximation AFR = 100%/(MTBF/8760) which isn't valid for small MTBF.
@Zemm said:
Though in windows explorer (can't remember Finder behaviour with keyboard shortcuts) delete will archive the file in the recycle bin (Trash) so it is not immediately deleted.
I think I've just realized the problem. Language is now evolving so quickly that words no longer have constant meaning, so that things like "archive" and "recycle bin*" are now synonymous.
*Because I know I always put things in the recycling bin when I think I might want to dig them out a couple weeks later.**
**Yes I know this is an argument from decades ago when Microsoft chose that stupid name.
@dhromed said:
Let's do more gif threads.
Makes me want to say that Skippy is better, even though I don't really know if that's true or not, and especially because it's in a deliberately misinterpreted subject domain.
I find this to be another gleaming example of why appliances shouldn't have software on them.
I know I will rue the day when it's impossible to buy a shoelace that isn't "internet of things"-ified complete with hackers then sending fake "your shoelace is untied!" texts or eyeball messages or telepathy waves or whatever they'll have around by then.
@flabdablet said:
This is against the self-interest of anybody spending electricity to mine Bitcoin
Muppet sort of said this already, but he was coming from a standpoint of error.
What about "people who just want to watch the world burn"? Those people's self interest is to destroy <whatever> so they have no problem spending electricity (or money or whatever) to do it.
After thinking about this for a while, I think I would define art as "the aspect of creative work that has no physical purpose - that is, its only purpose is to evoke some kind of emotional or intellectual response".
Distinction is as follows: consider the painting of the Mona Lisa. The painting itself is art, although the canvas, paint, frame, etc. are not. After all, those can be used to block a hole in a wall, or be used as kindling, or bash someone over the head. But the painting "as a whole" serves no purpose other than to be observed. "Art" is what is left when you remove the physical embodiment of the thing.
So annoying abstract art? Yup, it's art. An automobile with specific styling - the styling is art, the automobile is not.
Many "works of art" therefore have a combination of functional and emotional elements - but I would only call the emotional elements art; the rest of it is just whatever it is (e.g., a vide game may have art in it, but the game itself isn't art - at least not the pure mechanical bits of it).
I purposefully left the definition with loopholes - such as what constitutes "a work of art"? Is it any work that contains art, or is it the art itself?
@dkf said:
Since some the stupid about in this area is so profound
?Parse error
(Or is it some kind of meta-thing?)
@boomzilla said:
POLAR VORTEX.
Damn you, The Weather Channel, and all your silly weather names and sensational terms*.
*Yes I know a polar vortex is a real thing, but it doesn't need to be sensationalized.
@DrakeSmith said:
But if we just left it at a crime only if they affect someone else, that's severely going to infringe on the rights/liberties/lives of those others in large numbers.
@PedanticCurmudgeon said:
But since it always affects someone else,
PedandticCurmudgeon has it here: every action taken (and even ideas discussed) by anyone always affects someone somewhere. There is no way to have no effect (unless the light cones don't intersect, which is unlikely given the context of this discussion). Some people attempt to get around this by saying "adversely affect someone" but there is no objective measurement for "adverse" so that is of little help.
Character encodings are annoying. Just send an image file, and you don't have to worry about if that is a degree symbol or a primera indicator or whatever other crazy things people call that teeny superscript circle.
@blakeyrat said:
Why do you believe this is a WTF?
Semi-related: Outlook 2007 appears to ignore audio settings when you do this. I have my speakers set as mute, and I'll still get a beep from time to time, but only if I had at one point had my speakers unmuted during a reboot cycle.
That is, normally I always have my system on mute, but occasionally I'll have a Lync call and so plug in my headphones and unmute, then mute after I'm done. This tends to result in the 'beep' from my PC speakers (or headphones if they are still plugged in).
@communist_goatboy said:
At least they are using Doxygen comments.
This does not earn points in my book. But then again, that's probably due to the particular way in which our projects (mis|ab)use Doxygen.
@fire2k said:
Man, I remember doing a bigger C#...
Bah I guess I missed that.
Stupid operator overloading...
edit: got ninja'd by locallunatic!
@fire2k said:
if (bla == "sth") return true
Nothing wrong with
from a code style standpoint in my book.return (blah=="sth");
The review comment I would give for this is, "Are you sure you want to compare something to the address of a static string?"
@El_Heffe said:
Of course there is no explanation WTF this means. Clicking on them changes from 'showing private results' to 'hiding private results' but has no noticable effect on anything.
This is what happens when you have too many employees and too much money.
Part of the problem is that those descriptions are things that most people would never infer from those icons. I would have inferred something like "search for people" or "search the world" or "show me Google Earth". A closed and open lock would have been better...at least those indicate something about access.
@OldCrow said:
-I strongly support use of makefiles as a way to direct compilation, due to their explicity. If something doesn't compile, the makefile always tells you why.
Because [Error: 2] is ever so helpful...
"A field of mutually exclusive bits"
Seems like the first line of a poem... or a geek joke.
The big problem I've had with Voyager (just recently watching it for the first time, actually - only have the finale left) is that in general the episodes had really really bad pacing: they would have some typical conundrum and then it would go from being intractable to resolved in the last minute of the show, with no build-up to it, just "oh look we solved it now!" then have almost no time for conclusion, afterthought, or reflection. The number of repeated storylines is also crazy - I don't know how many times my wife and I said "They already did that on TNG or TOS." (Terrorists, gladiator rings, abducting the computerized crewman (how many times!?), trying to decide if "artificial lifeforms" have rights, etc.) That and the fact that the most interesting characters on the show are Seven and the Doctor...everyone else seems too contrived.
I'd still vote TNG as the best, even though when I watch it now it is quite campy sometimes. At least it had the advantage of coming up with more original storylines, not relying on temporal anomalies every 3 episodes, and wove the character development into the general storyline, rather than Voyager writing episodes that were screaming "Oh look, this is a <character X> development episode!".
I never got into DS9 because it seemed too much like a soap opera but I might go back and give it a second chance (never watched the whole thing, maybe about 30% of the first 2 seasons or so) and I'm going to give Enterprise a whirl. I only ever saw the pilot of that series.
Edit: Hey look, while I wrote this, several other posts on the same criticisms... go figure.
@TDWTF123 said:
Personally, I'd abolish almost all current taxes and replace the lot with land value taxation (or tax on other fixed, immovable assets, such as they may be). It's the only form of taxation that's actually economically beneficial rather than harmful, and it's also extremely difficult to avoid.
By land value taxation, you mean charge a tax based on total wealth*, even if a person had no income? This would require a person to use their wealth in a productive manner, I agree, so that might be a good approach. I would still probably tax the property (wealth) based on percentile though - so people that held more wealth had to make more productive use of it.
Am I understanding that correctly?
*I include all valuable assets here as wealth, not just "fixed, immovable assets" because of silly things like IP and people who just sit on piles of resources (e.g. commodities warehousing).
@xaade said:
The one thing I'd argue against is any attempt to address wealth inequality. People's efforts must carry value. If you try to say that effort is equal, then you remove incentive. The more productive a person is, the higher their income. I'd like to keep to that as much as possible. Of course that carries the weight of curbing some of the over-inflating income of the highest earners. But if money makes money, then money making money demands productivity, and more producitivity is more money for everyone.
Wealth inequality in and of itself isn't a bad thing, as you indicated. What's bad, though, is a system that ensures that wealth inequality tends to result in a system where the wealth is concentrated. The "percentile-based" system doesn't prevent wealth inequality - it just prevents the wealthiest from owning everything and does it in a structured way, rather than having it enforced by some strange mechanisms (like anti-monopoly law which is not consistently applied).
@xaade said:
You have to think of the rich like an engine. Their demand for wealth drives productivity.
Eh... perhaps. A demand for wealth may increase productivity. It may also simply reallocate wealth. Reallocation of wealth is generally considered unwanted compared to productivity increases. If you look at the recent global "recession" what we saw really wasn't that great a reduction in wealth (after all, people didn't stop making things in factories, but simply made a little less) but a reduction in the rate of change of wealth. Wealth distribution changed dramatically during that period however - and it made it less equal. Consider this: what if one person owned all the real estate in a city and simply rented it out, and refused to sell. What structures would you put in place to prevent that from happening (that didn't rely on arbitrary things like anti-monopoly laws, which are inconsistently and subjectively applied?) The system proposed starts reducing incentive to own more unless other people also own more. This is a much better structure if the goal is to improve wealth for everyone.
If, instead, productivity really increased during that time, we would see increased standards of living instead of stagnant or reduced. By most accounts (at least in the US and most of Europe), standards of living have not been increasing.
@xaade said:
What I would address is opportunity inequality. If someone has the desire and means to be productive, we need to ensure they are at their max productivity. This has the downside of potentially splitting up families, so it's a fragile goal. If someone has the desire to be unproductive and has the means, they need to be either punished or unsupported (depending on the severity). We simply do not have the ability to support people who desire to be unproductive. That issue must be left to private charity to reform those people. If that makes them homeless, so be it.
I'm not sure what you mean here - although I've heard it several times before. All opporunities are inherently unequal so long as we live in a physical universe. Unless you have an equal distribution of resources and ability, opportunity is generally unequal. What society could do is ensure that barriers to entry are low, and that acquisition of wealth always has diminishing marginal returns. This would encourage people to acquire more, but would prevent what we have today, which is where acquisition of wealth has stable or increasing marginal return (look at market makers, for instance).
Also, I find it very dangerous to assert "we need to ensure they are at their max productivity" because how do you define if someone is at their max productivity? How are you going to force someone to be productive? How do you decide if someone is not "as productive as they should be" and then punish them?
@xaade said:
And don't you start with "Democrats want to tax the rich." Because that's bull. Doesn't matter what politicians are in office, rich people give less % in taxes than I do. Make it a flat % tax, no deductions, and the government gets more money than they do now, because the rich end up taxed more.
No, don't do a flat tax rate please - it's terribly regressive. It's almost as bad as tax deductions at marginal rate instead of tax credits*.
Instead, do this: your income tax rate is your wealth percentile squared. So if you hold the most wealth in the country, your income tax rate is 100% - you cannot accrue more wealth. If you are right at 50%, your income tax is 25%; slightly higher than today's values perhaps. In the 1st percentile? Income tax rate is 0.01%. The reason you do wealth percentile and not income percentile is because of goofy things like CEOs making $1 in salary and $10M in "non-income" things. You'd also have to put in stuff that correctly accounts for people trying to assign their wealth somewhere else (like in corporations or foundations or something). This scheme has the added effect of helping naturally counter wealth inequality (income inequality doesn't really matter as much as wealth inequality) because if you are super-rich, you essentially stop accruing new wealth.It would also be interesting to see the top percentile fighting themselves so they aren't the 100%th percentile person... (I'd also assess property tax in a way that increased the more property you hold, to prevent too much real estate from being owned by too few entities.)
This scheme is also nice because it's always 100% inflation proof, because it's always based on relative wealth compared to the entire population for that year, rather than some arbitrary rate. You could probably implement it by having your tax rate in year X determined by wealth measurement in year X-1, so you can still collect taxes quarterly or annually or whatever.
The downside is that the government would not be able to increase or decrease revenues easily, but have to be constrained to actual productivity of the nation.
*Say you're in the 25% tax bracket and have a $10000 deduction, so that saves you $2500. But if you're in the $30% tax bracket and have a $10k deduction, that saves you $3k. (Assuming the deduction doesn't change your tax bracket of course. Brackets here are also for examples and round numbers. This is also US Federal tax specific, actual results may vary in other jurisdictions, dimensions, or timelines).
@joe.edwards said:
So there's no way of learning from history ever because historical events can only unfold one way and therefore it's impossible to determine causal relationships?
Correct, because when it comes to history, which is just human interaction, there is actually no way to have the same (or similar enough for purposes of this discussion) sequence of events occur given the same inputs.
People (and even individuals) do not really act in a deterministic manner. So we can use history to say things like "look, war is bad, lots of people and stuff get blown up" and we might be able to say "people used this particular event as justification for their behavior" but since those situations - and more importantly involving those same people - never occur twice, history cannot be predictive.
History is not by any stretch of the imagination a predictive science. It might have some general trends like "if you make people mad enough they may resort to violence" but it's incapable of making statements like "if you do this particular thing to this particular group they will get mad enough to resort to violence."
@Ben L. said:
I'm okay with eating animals as long as they were farm animals and not wild animals.
Is that anything like being a vegetarian not because you like animals, but because you hate plants?
@Zecc said:
What next? A discussion over the pros and cons of FWD vs RWD vs AWD?
Well, clearly, AWD comes first alphabetically.
F is pretty easy to draw.
R takes the most ink to print.
@joe.edwards said:
You mean my pony's not going to foal baby centaurs?
Blah... I can't remember the name of the creature that has a horse's top half and human bottom half (e.g., the equine version of a minotaur).
I was actually most disappointed by the fact that people claim something is right or wrong without an objective reason for such an assertion. I think it's a side effect of post-modernism really. After all, the rational universe itself doesn't have concepts of right and wrong, so saying that personal consent or freedom or lack of pain or whatever is better or worse than anything else is largely irrelevant without a reason why something is better than something else.
I guess I blame modern education, because it apparently has failed to teach people that "right and wrong" really are wholly defined by society, and so those things do change over time. Unless, of course, you believe there is an absolute moral standard - aside from religion, though, there aren't any reasons why such an absolute standard would exist in the first place. That is: you either believe moral standards are arbitrarily created by man, and so can change, or there is some external construct that establishes a moral standard independent of what mankind (or alienkind or whatever) thinks about it.
Simple argument: why is it better for (human) society to keep going into the future rather than die off? For some reason people think that's the ultimate goal - but why? Without religion, why does it matter if we just live it up as much as we can today and let the future generations (if there are any) deal with it later? I've never heard a good argument - if there are any, I'd like to hear them. And by "good argument", I mean one that isn't turtles all the way down.
@bardofspoons42 said:
"An administrator should be able to add new users"
If an administrator can't add new users, you might want to review his training plan.
@bardofspoons42 said:
"As a user, I should be able to search customers"
I could agree that searching customers should be something a user should be able to do - if the user is a TSA employee perhaps.
By the way - I do agree that those statements are the start of a requirements document. If you stop at those statments without developing formal requirements though, you're asking for a world of scope creep and missed expectations. (This assumes, of course, the project is large enough to warrant formal requirements. If it's not a formal project, then, eh, whatever.)
It's stories like this that make me feel justified in my <insert adjective indicating your flavor of disagreement here> assertion that software exceptions cause more problems than they solve.
@FrostCat said:
Exactly: Like I said, keyed connectors.
Assuming the component is correctly placed in its slot - what makes you so sure the keyed receptacle will be placed in the correct orientation?