The table of non-sense
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I have been reading the daily wtf even before it was renamed, re-renamed and re-re-re-named. And I always do enjoy those stories very much.It gives me a good laugh.
But today I want to share a story on my own. Since I am a student I think that it is kind of unfair to make fun of my colleagues since they are still learning.. Ok, in the fourth semester one might argue that knowing that 101b is 3 in decimal is common. Especially when one is focussing on digital electronics..
But that pain is long gone..
Now I am a master student and I expected that being a master student would have sorted out most of those clueless people. I was wrong.. Unfortunately..
In one of our courses we were working on creating a product. A watch that should have some advanced features. Actually I kind of liked the whole concept. And as the group of business people was already crowded, I have chosen to lead the software guys. The watch was networked and of course we needed to have some web presence to configure the watch and do some other stuff. I was happy that one guy spontaneously agreed to take the web part. I for myself hate doing all those browser dependant stuff where you have to take care about security and scalability. During the whole course I noticed that this guy was failing to get the whole concept. He somehow did what we agreed upon with him, but the results were never as I expected. At the end we had to write a report. I sent him a layout guidance of the report filled with ipsum lorem stuff. Later he was asking me what language that is and I told him that it just is some placeholder and that he would have to replace it with his stuff. Even after sending him my part of the report he did seem to have some trouble writing it. When I received his final report (which he was working on during the whole night before deadline) this was his very first page at the very top. That was the moment when I was really thinking WTF! in big letters and with lots of !!!!
I putted this picture aside and did not think about it anymore. But today I saw it again and I was still shaking my head... Of course the watch itself is not running a web server.
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@yuppi said:
one might argue that knowing that 101b is 3 in decimal is common.
The Real WTF is that....
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@viraptor said:
@yuppi said:
one might argue that knowing that 101b is 3 in decimal is common.
The Real WTF is that....I was trying to figure that out myself. Was this a joke?
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Stupid typo that is ;) I meant 5 of course.
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@yuppi said:
Stupid typo that is ;) I meant 5 of course.
I guess we can let that one slide, first post and all!
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Haha. I love when people post WTFs and create a WTF of their own.
In fairnes, I was never very good at doing arithmetic or base conversions by hand.
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Reading through your description, I was actually thinking you had a web server running on the watch. I mean, the idea sounds kind of WTFy, but you're talking about a watch that has network connectivity and needs a configuration front-end. Clearly this watch is pretty (over)powerful, so running a web server on it isn't that much stranger.
As for the lorem ipsum thing, I only know what that is because somebody posted some lorem ipsum here a while back, and it took quite a few of us to figure out that it wasn't a real language. It's not that common of a thing outside of design business--especially if your friend was from a non-English speaking country. Lorem ipsum was designed to look similar enough to English at a glance, so as not to distract from the actual design. If I was designing a chinese web site, I'd have to find their own brand of gibborish.
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I don't mind if people don't know something. It only bothers me if they show up to be learn resistant. I showed him all the literature that is available and I was explaining him what it is for, but it just didn't help. And if you are really into web design you should know lorem ipsum.
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@vt_mruhlin said:
As for the lorem ipsum thing, [...] it took quite a few of us to figure out that it wasn't a real language. Lorem ipsum was designed to look similar enough to English at a glance, so as not to distract from the actual design.
Lorem Ipsum comes from an actual Latin text, but chopped up and changed and looking like gibberish because it's copied and pasted in bits and pieces for a long time now.
Personally, I dislike it, though it's easy to come by. No Western-European language has that many long words. It does not really look like English, nor was it truly designed to look like anything. Slight modificiations have been made to it to "fix" this. I feel it's a futile attempt, as it's not even readable to most people because not that many people can actually read Latin.
I prefer to copypaste from real texts, in the native language. How text reads is every bit as important as how text looks.
(hm. Maybe I could collect English texts about Lorem Ipsum, and use those)
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@yuppi said:
And if you are really into web design you should know lorem ipsum.
And if you're really into it, you should know about the typophile version of Lorem Ipsum. :)
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@dhromed said:
Entschuldigung, aber deutschsprachige Internetuser können problemlos ellenlange Wortkonstrukte, bisweilen sogar schwindelerregende und annähernd unentzifferbare extremkonkatenative Albtraumkomposita verwenden. Auch außerhalb von Onlinediskussionen sind derartige Kommunikationsmittel wohlbekannt.Personally, I dislike it, though it's easy to come by. No Western-European language has that many long words.
(Translation for the germanically challenged: "Excuse me, but German-speaking internet users can easily use drawn-out word constructs, at times even almost indecypherable extremely concatenative nightmare composites. Outside of online discussions, too, are such means of communication well-known.")
Just because your language has a composite deficiency doesn't mean every one has. ;)
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@dhromed said:
How text reads is every bit as important as how text looks.
That's precisely the problem. If you use real text, people will inevitably judge the design based on the text more so that the actual design, no matter how much you indicate they should not do. That's why Loreum Ipsum is used.
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@j6cubic said:
@dhromed said:
Entschuldigung, aber deutschsprachige Internetuser können problemlos ellenlange Wortkonstrukte, bisweilen sogar schwindelerregende und annähernd unentzifferbare extremkonkatenative Albtraumkomposita verwenden. Auch außerhalb von Onlinediskussionen sind derartige Kommunikationsmittel wohlbekannt.Personally, I dislike it, though it's easy to come by. No Western-European language has that many long words.
(Translation for the germanically challenged: "Excuse me, but German-speaking internet users can easily use drawn-out word constructs, at times even almost indecypherable extremely concatenative nightmare composites. Outside of online discussions, too, are such means of communication well-known.")
Just because your language has a composite deficiency doesn't mean every one has. ;)
Ah, but that is arguably a Central-European language. :)
Hell, if long words is what you want, German's got nothing on Finnish! (though it's impressive)
[fi]
"Anteeksipyydellen sanoisimmekohan, että suomenkielisillä internet-käyttäjiä katselemalla ja niiden keskuudesta rautalangalla etsiskelemällä löydettäisiinköhän ylivoimaisella varmuudella äidinkielen kiemurtelevaisuudella pelleillen naurettavien sananpituuksien taitajia."
that is,
[en]
"Let's say (with apologies), that by watching Finnish-speaking internet users and among them searching like crazy, we might probably find - with great certainty - individuals who are talented about ridiculous wordlengths by way of fooling around with the twisting flexibility of their native language."
Thus giving (punctuation not counted here):
German: 272 / 25 = 10,88 average chars per word.
Finnish: 272 / 20 = 13,6 average chars per word.
The English translation is at a meager 5,7 average.
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@fbjon said:
Hell, if long words is what you want, German's got nothing on Finnish! (though it's impressive)Going further afield you get to Sanskrit, where there's no real limit on the length of words. There's a book of one-word Sanskrit poems somewhere...
