WTF Bites
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In conclusion, Microsoft translates interface elements not just without paying attention to the context they appear in, but without even making sure they are consistent with each other on a single screen.
If they're anything like WTFCorp, all the snippets of text-to-be-translated get shoved into an Excel spreadsheet with no context and emailed to a translation agency.
Note: That's what we used to do; what we do now is actually worse (and more enterprisey). Basically, the same but with Rube Goldberg levels of systems integration. All the problems of the old system, but with some new ones as well (i.e. sometimes the marble fails to wake up the hamster).
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If they're anything like WTFCorp, all the snippets of text-to-be-translated get shoved into an Excel spreadsheet with no context and emailed to a translation agency.
Note: That's what we used to do; what we do now is actually worse (and more enterprisey). Basically, the same but with Rube Goldberg levels of systems integration. All the problems of the old system, but with some new ones as well (i.e. sometimes the marble fails to wake up the hamster).
You use Just In Time Translation via (presumably) humans in the cloud as well?
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all the snippets of text-to-be-translated get shoved into
an Excel spreadsheet with no context and emailed to a translation agencyBing! machine lurning... hurr durr I'm a dense stone ventilator
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In conclusion, Microsoft translates interface elements not just without paying attention to the context they appear in, but without even making sure they are consistent with each other on a single screen.
If they're anything like WTFCorp, all the snippets of text-to-be-translated get shoved into an Excel spreadsheet with no context and emailed to a translation agency.
Note: That's what we used to do; what we do now is actually worse (and more enterprisey). Basically, the same but with Rube Goldberg levels of systems integration. All the problems of the old system, but with some new ones as well (i.e. sometimes the marble fails to wake up the hamster).
At my company we usually include the keys in our Excel sheets, which should usually provide enough context for the translators, but sometimes they still get it wrong.
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If they're anything like WTFCorp, all the snippets of text-to-be-translated get shoved into an Excel spreadsheet with no context and emailed to a translation agency.
To be fair I think this is pretty standard. We send our message file off to a translation agency as well, and I would be surprised if we haven't generated a few similar WTFs in there. Unless you have a significant base in a foreign country it's not worth spending the time and money to usability test extensively in different languages - the reputational damage from having a few language WTFs is not that high.
I would kind of expect Microsoft with a major western European language to have got it right though.
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If they're anything like WTFCorp, all the snippets of text-to-be-translated get shoved into an Excel spreadsheet with no context and emailed to a translation agency.
This is how it works with my special client, but we have a special locale enabeld on staging which shows untranslated keys on the UI, so the translator can see what goes where.
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@Tsaukpaetra The words are clearly related, but there is a distinct shift in meaning. You can use ‘actual’ in the sense of ‘current’ as opposed to ‘previous’ and ‘actualize’ in the sense of update in English, but it is unusual. More common is ‘actual’ as opposed to ‘virtual’, ‘predicted’, ‘calculated’ etc. But in German that ‘aktualisieren’ means specifically update.
Interestingly, the same is true in Polish. Aktualny = current, aktualizować = to update.
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@Gąska Yes, in Czech also. In my previous job we ended up with many methods like
ActualSpeedandActualPosition(meaning current speed and current position, of course) due to somewhat poorer command of English by the programmer who wrote them.
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@Bulb I know that feel. I've seen the exact same thing in my actual
job too.
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WTF of my day: Okay, this is most definitely not Ankh-Morpork's Watch. This is some confused mess which resulted from someone glancing at the books from five feet away, doing a pantomime to someone else who jotted down some notes, threw those in a blender and then taped it back together. Badly.
BBC's The Watch 'shares no DNA with Terry Pratchett's work', says daughter
Rhianna Pratchett joins fans unhappy with the forthcoming TV adaptation of her father’s Discworld stories about Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch
Genderswapping Lord Vetinari? Why in the seven hells do you need to do that? The Discworld has no shortage of strong and capable women (The Witches, Lady Sybil, Angua, half of the dwarves, ...). But the whole dig at gender issues through the dwarves was probably too subtle. Then again, Cheery is not a dwarf in this abomination either.
Also, this makes Vimes look like an imbecile. He was a drunk, yes. But a sharp one. Also, no Nobby Nobs, Sgt Colon or Detritus.
But sure. You have plenty of source books with fully fleshed-out characters. Let's eviscerate those and only keep the names.
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Genderswapping Lord Vetinari? Why in the seven hells do you need to do that?
My cynical self believes there is an actual answer to this question, and that it's honestly a very good reason. It also believes it's a bad idea to say what it is outside the Garage.
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Genderswapping Lord Vetinari? Why in the seven hells do you need to do that?
My cynical self believes there is an actual answer to this question, and that it's honestly a very good reason. It also believes it's a bad idea to say what it is outside the Garage.
I'd say that there are plenty of moronic reasons for doing so. If the books were a complete sausage fest, okay, I'd understand where they're coming from but doing that to Pratchett's works? The guy who picked a bone with pretty much any social issue? The guy who wrote this?
To me that just shows that the writers of that show clearly do not have the faintest of clues what Discworld was all about.
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I'd understand where they're coming from
That's not it. I meant something far more pragmatic.
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The Discworld has no shortage of strong and capable women (The Witches, Lady Sybil, Angua, half of the dwarves, ...).
In fact it has no women that would not be strong and capable. All the losers are either male or mythical creatures, as are most characters that exist mainly as the butt of the joke (the Mages). Only woman that is mainly the butt of a joke I can think off is Letice Earwig, and even she's redeemed by her self-absorption coming in handy during the events of the Shepherd's Crown.
But the whole dig at gender issues through the dwarves was probably too subtle.
More importantly, the whole dig at gender issues through the dwarves is a subversion. They have perfect equality—most of the time, others don't even know what gender a dwarf is, so they simply can't discriminate against either—but they are realizing one size does not fit all and they want some difference.
Angua
On the screenshot she looks a bit too punk. She's supposed to be beautiful, with long blonde hair and look somewhat fragile, which conveniently masks the fact she's actually a badass fighter that is immune to most weapons to top it off.
Also, no Nobby Nobs, Sgt Colon
Yeah, right, drop the comical relief characters from what's supposed to be fun.
Detritus
I suspect they've decided to waste their special effects budget on less interesting things instead.
It also reminds me a bit of how the animated Asterix movies are great, but the ones with real actors are rather disappointing—the caricature and cartoon physics is simply important part of what makes it funny. And similarly making Detritus that would work in real action would be rather hard (How does he move around in buildings while being large enough to carry a siege ballista? You can tweak the scale in animation to fit and it will only look funny, but in real action it wouldn't work).
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@Rhywden Yeah it looks like a complete nonsense. Honestly I'm not sure it's possible to make a good live-action Pratchett cover, a lot of its appeal is the absurdity and I suspect you need the imagination to help you with that. But that's still no excuse for this level of messing with it.
There is a definite strand of thinking at the BBC at the moment that everything must bow before 'diversity' - whether that be shoehorning non-white characters into period dramas set in rural England, or shoehorning women into roles where they don't make sense. (The 'Black Bond' discussion is part of the same thing - because a popular character is a white man, some people think that alone means it needs changing.)
As you say this is completely unnecessary for Pratchett who wrote plenty of strong female characters.
(Ironically they probably could have got away with the token race diversity as I don't think most of the characters are described in enough detail to assume their skin colour.)
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@bobjanova said in WTF Bites:
Ironically they probably could have got away with the token race diversity as I don't think most of the characters are described in enough detail to assume their skin colour.
Actually it explicitly says somewhere, I think Fifth Elephant, something along the line that there was no racism in Ankh-Morpork, only speciism; the humans of all colours just banded together against dwarves or trolls or other species. So making some of the people black is actually canonically correct.
They would need to keep the species though (i.e. not drop Detritus).
Switching genders on the other hand is not really working.
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@bobjanova said in WTF Bites:
Honestly I'm not sure it's possible to make a good live-action Pratchett cover
Some of the attempts to date have been pretty creditable, but I think I'll be avoiding this one.
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So I have a problem with Fidelity and I might need to contact them. So I check the Contact Us page in their system, pick my country to get a phone number, and...
My PASSWORD?! This is a fucking financial institution! I used to have a shitload of money in there!
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@blek Giving them the benefit of the doubt, maybe it's a specific password for phone banking. I had to set one up ages ago, despite only calling my bank to talk to representatives who don't need the password.
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WTF of my day: Okay, this is most definitely not Ankh-Morpork's Watch. This is some confused mess which resulted from someone glancing at the books from five feet away, doing a pantomime to someone else who jotted down some notes, threw those in a blender and then taped it back together. Badly.
BBC's The Watch 'shares no DNA with Terry Pratchett's work', says daughter
Rhianna Pratchett joins fans unhappy with the forthcoming TV adaptation of her father’s Discworld stories about Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch
Genderswapping Lord Vetinari? Why in the seven hells do you need to do that? The Discworld has no shortage of strong and capable women (The Witches, Lady Sybil, Angua, half of the dwarves, ...). But the whole dig at gender issues through the dwarves was probably too subtle. Then again, Cheery is not a dwarf in this abomination either.
Also, this makes Vimes look like an imbecile. He was a drunk, yes. But a sharp one. Also, no Nobby Nobs, Sgt Colon or Detritus.
But sure. You have plenty of source books with fully fleshed-out characters. Let's eviscerate those and only keep the names.
This makes me wonder. As I recall, Pratchett kept pretty tight control on previous screen adoptions (hogfather, colour of magic, going postal). Rhianna's his only daughter and she's not happy. How the hell did they got a hold of the license to produce this shite? Or are they changing stuff and calling it "inspired by" in order to not need one?
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Seems like the place where it's concatenating feature flags for diagnostic purposes. Some of those variables / constants might be empty strings, I guess?
I have read about development strategies where you use feature flags to keep all main development on a single branch, but of course it's hard to say if that's what's going on here.I can say, having access to the rest of the class, that these are not flags, nor do we do development in a single branch (we have literally hundreds of feature branches).
No, it looks like a denormalized table DTO with a ton of columns.
I'm afraid it's worse than I'd thought...
Those fields represent... character ranges?
Filed under: Yes, I found that query in an XML file.
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@PleegWat Apparently Terry, and later Rhianna, were both involved in the initial stages of it way back in 2011, but that has somehow changed in the meantime
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WTF of my day: Okay, this is most definitely not Ankh-Morpork's Watch. This is some confused mess which resulted from someone glancing at the books from five feet away, doing a pantomime to someone else who jotted down some notes, threw those in a blender and then taped it back together. Badly.
BBC's The Watch 'shares no DNA with Terry Pratchett's work', says daughter
Rhianna Pratchett joins fans unhappy with the forthcoming TV adaptation of her father’s Discworld stories about Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch
Sorry. No. Vimes looks like this:
I won't countenance otherwise.
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@hungrier Well, I've had that account for years, and I don't use it anymore, so I suppose it's possible when it was first opened they asked me to set a special phone password, but in that case I'm screwed because I have no recollection of that. Sigh.
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@error It looks like the columns are 17,000 characters long (16Ki?) and someone was under the delusion that you couldn't operate on text greater than 1000 characters. In fairness, some DBMS treat CLOBs (character large objects, >2000 characters historically) differently in queries, but they have no problem returning them to applications.
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@Watson Sir Terry himself stated that he imagined him as a younger, slightly bulkier version of Pete Postlethwaite.
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@e4tmyl33t said in WTF Bites:
@PleegWat Apparently Terry, and later Rhianna, were both involved in the initial stages of it way back in 2011, but that has somehow changed in the meantime
I'm sure Terry has had his reasons to stop being involved, whatever they were.
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@Watson Sir Terry himself stated that he imagined him as a younger, slightly bulkier version of Pete Postlethwaite.
Ah, Postlethwaite. That's the name I was trying to remember (check out that browline). Still, cross that with a bit of Eastwood and you've got Kirby's depiction.
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@e4tmyl33t said in WTF Bites:
@PleegWat Apparently Terry, and later Rhianna, were both involved in the initial stages of it way back in 2011, but that has somehow changed in the meantime
I'm sure Terry has had his reasons to stop being involved, whatever they were.
INDEED.
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My Amazon Day is Friday but apparently they can't deliver on this Friday, so my replacement Amazon Day is Monday. Unless I opt for Prime delivery, then they apparently can deliver on Friday.
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I think the Blizzard login servers crashed fully now due to Shadowlands PREPATCH release.
At the time of writing, my wait time is now 32720 minutes. It was 10 minutes before the crash. And based off Discords I am in, this happened to everyone in queue. I have seen better performance of the login servers on expansion launch days. Dear $deity.
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At the time of writing, my wait time is now 32720 minutes.
LOL. 11.5 days. Good luck, it was Patch Tuesday yesterday. Reboot pending in 3..2..1...
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@Atazhaia
That explains why all you WOW heads were angry enough to DDOS FFXIV and ruin Housing (Ultimate)!
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@dcon In EU we got Patch Wednesday instead. We get it the day after NA.
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@dcon In EU we got Patch Wednesday instead. We get it the day after NA.
I remember back in early classic we patched on Friday. There would always be problems, which would never be fixed until Monday.
I cheered when they moved it to Wed, and I'm sure many others did with me.
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@dcon In EU we got Patch Wednesday instead. We get it the day after NA.
Well, that's usually when I see them too.
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@PleegWat said in Tales from Coronavee-rooss Italy, mamma mia!:
Supersnelle blaastest voor corona moet maatschappij weer op gang brengen
Wie volgende maand naar de teststraat gaat voor een coronatest, krijgt bij de ingang wellicht eerst een blaasproef. Een in Nederland ontwikkelde ademmeter kan bij ongeveer driekwart van de bezoekers direct zeggen dat ze geen covid hebben, als ruwe voorselectie bij de teststraat.
Nice blur. What kind of website is this? What am I supposed to do here?!
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At the time of writing, my wait time is now 32720 minutes. It was 10 minutes before the crash. And based off Discords I am in, this happened to everyone in queue. I have seen better performance of the login servers on expansion launch days. Dear $deity.
Why are they using integers for that? Surely they should use floats so they can get
InfandNaN…
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@Atazhaia Best one I saw posted in Discord was this:
So that person will get to start 2021 by finally getting to log into WoW! For the record, it took me ~2 hours to get on. Which may very well be the longest I have got to wait to get onto WoW ever, even the Cataclysm launch went faster (~1 hour of repeated login attemps.) At least for the actual launch I can just make sure to be logged into the character well in advance and just wait for launch to happen and get to start questing, as Blizz no longer needs to reboot the servers to make expansions go live.
Also, as an addendum, as this was the waiting time to log into the Blizzard App, this also caused issues for anyone wanting to play any other Blizz game and CoD. Although those with updated clients could just launch WoW directly and have much shorter queue times.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
My Amazon Day is Friday but apparently they can't deliver on this Friday, so my replacement Amazon Day is Monday. Unless I opt for Prime delivery, then they apparently can deliver on Friday.
It'll be delivered today. For the benefit of people from the future, today is Thursday.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
It'll be delivered today. For the benefit of people from the future, today is Thursday.
I usually end up getting things delivered a day early. “Fortunately” I'm always at home to receive things right now.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
It'll be delivered today. For the benefit of people from the future, today is Thursday.
I usually end up getting things delivered a day early. “Fortunately” I'm always at home to receive things right now.
I don't normally see it suggest dates for Prime Delivery that aren't next day, but yeah, on the occasion it happens the delivery is normally early.
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JIRA-94376: When we run
$reportwe get this database error:blah blah blahMy report developer resolves the ticket:
Changed some formatting
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@Atazhaia Best one I saw posted in Discord was this:
So that person will get to start 2021 by finally getting to log into WoW! For the record, it took me ~2 hours to get on. Which may very well be the longest I have got to wait to get onto WoW ever, even the Cataclysm launch went faster (~1 hour of repeated login attemps.) At least for the actual launch I can just make sure to be logged into the character well in advance and just wait for launch to happen and get to start questing, as Blizz no longer needs to reboot the servers to make expansions go live.
Also, as an addendum, as this was the waiting time to log into the Blizzard App, this also caused issues for anyone wanting to play any other Blizz game and CoD. Although those with updated clients could just launch WoW directly and have much shorter queue times.
I didn't have a queue for the game at all, just for the app. And I'm pretty sure I only had to login to the app because it had to restart for an update.
The slowness on game start I think was to do with the character servers. Based on past interactions, I suspect upgrading character data is normally done on login to that character, rather than during the upgrade maintenance. However with the level squish being visible in the login screen they may have to upgrade all characters on first opening the character list for that server, and that would cause significantly more load as rarely-used alts have to be upgraded.
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@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
@loopback0 said in WTF Bites:
My Amazon Day is Friday but apparently they can't deliver on this Friday, so my replacement Amazon Day is Monday. Unless I opt for Prime delivery, then they apparently can deliver on Friday.
It'll be delivered today. For the benefit of people from the future, today is Thursday.
Meanwhile, my order, placed with Amazon Prime using two-day shipping, is still scheduled to arrive one week after placing the order. I guess by "Prime Day" they meant that if you have Amazon Prime, if you place orders on that day you can experience what you're paying to avoid
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Bonus fun: this email, sent 26 hours before the relevant event, says the meeting code will be sent 2 days before it begins.
<
> 24 hrs. < 26 hrs. < 48 hrs., so the event is on the 2nd day from now. </>
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@Gąska Yes, in Czech also. In my previous job we ended up with many methods like
ActualSpeedandActualPosition(meaning current speed and current position, of course) due to somewhat poorer command of English by the programmer who wrote them.As a native
EnglishAmerican speaker, those seem perfectly cromulent. They could be differentiated fromFutureSpeedandPredictedPositionor historical variants of the same.
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So because of the iPhone 12 preorders starting today, trying to access the Apple Store will get you redirected to a "preorders starting soon" page. No matter how you try to access it or what you want to buy or look at.
And of course Apple just assumes you will know it's about the iPhone 12 preorders. So even if I for example try to buy an iMac, it will give me the same page. No explanation or anything. Just this. Would it have been so fucking hard to include a message like "To prepare for the iPhone 12 preorders, the entire Apple Store is closed until $time."
