WTF Bites
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@medinoc My first thought was that it was messed up wrong - should be "7102017" - the 10 wasn't backwards. And now that I've typed that - damn, it's a palindrome.
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So, I bought an EZPass a few months ago, since my vacation trip was going to take me through Shitcago and Hellinois, and ain't no way I'm travelling through there without staying on the toll roads. 'cept, of course, I'm not an Illinois resident, so I buy an EZPass from my home state and it'll just work there, right?
Weeeelllll.... it worked in Indiana on the way there the same day I activated it. And it worked in Chicago, where apparently the Skyway tolls are at least partially managed by the company that manages EZPass. But it didn't work on the Illinois Tollway and I didn't check (because it worked everywhere else, why wouldn't it have worked there), so I got a lovely letter from Illinois in the mail.
- The fines for not paying the tolls are about 15x the cost of the tolls themselves
- But their letter says "hey, if you're an I-Pass or EZ-Pass customer, call before filing a dispute, we can get you taken care of"
- The only number on the letter is for the I-Pass hotline, call there... "oh, you need to call the EZ-Pass center in Indiana, they'll send you a form that you need to print and mail us
and then we can waive the fines." - Call the EZ-Pass hotline, wait on hold for a while. Their on hold music is... well, I don't really know, because they kept cutting into it every 30 seconds to assure me that "<dead air>...is important to us. All of our agents are helping other customers, your position in queue is: <TTS: first>"
sigh I know phone systems are hard. But seriously, guys?
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One of my students on Wednesdays is a Java programmer, and a big Linux fan. He's not preachy about it but we have lots of non-garage discussions about it and programming/technology in general.
When he left after the lesson I was looking out the window and saw this
But it wasn't his car!
That means there were two of them within metres of each other and they didn't even know it.
In Poland it's much more expensive (and unusual) to have a personalized plate, which bizarrely belongs to the car rather than the owner.
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@coldandtired said in WTF Bites:
have a personalized plate, which bizarrely belongs to the car rather than the owner.
I thought it was for the vehicle to have a stronger sense of identity? Is this not the case?
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@tsaukpaetra In the US it's like getting to actually choose your username when most people get assigned random usernames. You'd want to keep it and not give it away when you sell the car.
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@tsaukpaetra In the US it's like getting to actually choose your username when most people get assigned random usernames. You'd want to keep it and not give it away when you sell the car.
In my opinion, more people should have them in the US since the money goes to environmental programs.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@tsaukpaetra In the US it's like getting to actually choose your username when most people get assigned random usernames. You'd want to keep it and not give it away when you sell the car.
In my opinion, more people should have them in the US since the money goes to environmental programs.
No, that's special plates (like CA's whales). Personalized plates are separate. But they can be on the special plates. (And in CA, the plate belongs to the car - but you can transfer the plate when you get a new car)
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@coldandtired said in WTF Bites:
bizarrely belongs to the car rather than the owner
Can you transfer them? In the UK you can but because the numberplate identifies the age of the car, you can't put a plate on a car that would make it look newer than it is (e.g. if I have a 2004 plate I can transfer it to a 2008 car but not a 2000 one)
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@jaloopa You also can't transfer them unless the car is taxed and MOTed. I know someone who bought a ÂŁ100 Citroen Xantia to transfer his hideously expensive "one letter one digit" plate onto when he sold his Bentley before his new one was ready. Five years later, he's still running around in the Xantia and his wife drives the new Bentley - with a normal plate.
Guy just looooooooves pulling up outside posh golf clubs in his battered old green Xantia with a numberplate that's worth more than most of the other cars parked out front. And why shouldn't he?
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Can you transfer them?
In Poland, no. They stay with the car. Personalized plates are per county, so I think if you buy a car with one from another region you're not allowed to keep the plate.
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
Have we had a "worst date format" competition yet?
I'd like to submit the French Revolutionary Calendar to that competition, then.
Spurred on by the idea of the metric system and its decimal basis, it has weeks of 10 days. Grouped into 3 (yeah, not 10, but 100 days is too far from any useful natural time span) to get months, and 12 months (because somehow we need to stay close to the solar year). Which leaves us with 5 (or 6) days per year, grouped as complementary days at the end of the year (which is around September, because why not? (because that was when the first republic was founded, that's why)).
Note that these days make it impossible to write a date as any variations of "yyyy-MM-dd" since strictly speaking they wouldn't be part of any specific month. I guess if there ever were a numerical format for this calendar, we'd use a convention that MM=0 or 13 for these days. Or, more likely, some systems would use 0 and some would use 13. Or maybe -1. Or maybe they would accept any value outside of [1-12]. Except for systems where months would be 0-indexes and these days would be in month -1, 12, or anything outside [0-11].
Of course, all days and months have weird names (related to the seasons).
So today is Septidi, 7 VendĂŠmiaire 226. Yep.
Septidi is the 7th day of the week and since we are in the first week of the month, it is also the day of the month. Last week (September 21st), we were on the Day of Honours, 225 (complementary day, so no month...). I think. Maybe that was the Day of the Revolution, though, if year 225 was bissextile (2016 was, but no reason why that would be the case for 225). Who cares?
After reading I'm still no clearer what those white nights in Paris are offering ...
Various museums and similar stuff open until late (or maybe even the whole night). "Nuit blanche" means "all-nighter".
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In the UK you can but because the numberplate identifies the age of the car, you can't put a plate on a car that would make it look newer than it is (e.g. if I have a 2004 plate I can transfer it to a 2008 car but not a 2000 one)
Get a Northern Ireland plate; you don't need to be resident to do so. Those plates don't identify the age of the car at all, and so can be freely transferred.
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@scarlet_manuka said in WTF Bites:
@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
Have we had a "worst date format" competition yet?
Oooh. I must look up one that was put forward once in the forums of a game I used to play. Can't access it while at work, unfortunately.
Found it.
Please adjust server time to reflect my precise location and when the sun is at highest point overhead from my perspective. Currently, sun is at its highest point for me at GMT - 5 hrs 44 min. Please use this adjustment for my local apparent noon to calculate 00:00 in your server.
Also, please display all dates/times in the following format for my personal convenience:
YYYY:HH:DD*MM:mm:ss
as well as a second readout for
SS
underneath
where YYYY=year, HH=hour in 24 hour format, DD=day of month (1-31), MM=month, mm=minutes, and ss=seconds
SS=number of seconds since I joined [$GAME]. It should update in real time at least once per minute even if I am idle.
Under this superior system, I am posting at 2008:17:25*11:23:45 which is clearly much easier to read and use than the current system's display time of 25-11-2008 19:07Apart from the mangling of unit order, the main point to note is that the time zone adjustment automatically tracks a specific user's local solar noon and varies with it throughout the year, undoing the main reason for having time zones in the first place.
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@coldandtired said in WTF Bites:
bizarrely belongs to the car rather than the owner
Can you transfer them? In the UK you can but because the numberplate identifies the age of the car, you can't put a plate on a car that would make it look newer than it is (e.g. if I have a 2004 plate I can transfer it to a 2008 car but not a 2000 one)
Did you get that backwards? Surely a 2008 car is newer than both a 2004 and 2000 car?
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@lb_ You can make a 2008 car look older by putting a 2004 plate on it. You're not allowed to make a 2000 car look newer by putting a 2004 plate on it.
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@scarlet_manuka Ah right, I had that backward in my head.
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Brother works as a frontend dev in a largish MS-centered software company. They got a call yesterday. They were forewarned that inspectors would show up today with their little license sniffer dongles and check that all the software in the company was legal.
Almost none of the software was.
Their solution?
Take out all the normal HDD-s full of pirated Microsoft and Adobe stuff. Hide them somewhere. Buy a hundred fresh SSD-s overnight. Install Ubuntu and OSS crap, boot them up on all the PC-s. When the inspection starts, pretend it's business as usual.
Queue the entire company full of Microsoft people clicking around open office and sublime text, pretending they know what they are doing, while inspectors mill around, unable to test anything because their dongles don't work on linux.
They dinged them for a few laptops they never got around to cleaning, but overall, it worked.
I wish I was there, sounded like an amusing day. Don't say OSS isn't good for anything.
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@cartman82 said in WTF Bites:
They were forewarned that inspectors would show up today with their little license sniffer dongles and check that all the software in the company was legal.
Why couldn't they just ask them "do you have a warrant ?" and slam the door shut
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@timebandit said in WTF Bites:
Why couldn't they just ask them "do you have a warrant ?" and slam the door shut
I'm told that saying no to a BSA shakedown could be considered unwise.
Edit: To elaborate a bit. I first heard of such "shakedowns" when the BSA (or their local equivalent) forced two (I think) companies to shut down around here, probably in the early 2000s. I later met with one of the people who worked at one of the companies at the time, and according to him, they could either refuse and lose business with several big customers, or play along and hope to wiggle out of the fines/fees (they were, after all, playing loose with the licenses).
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@cartman82 said in WTF Bites:
pretend it's business as usual.
I wonder how many Linux converts were born that day...
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they could either refuse and lose business with several big customers, or play along and hope to wiggle out of the fines/fees
That sounds a lot like extortion.
Those big customers must be member of the alliance, or that threat would be baseless.
And all this reminded me of Ernie Ball:
Rockin' on without Microsoft
Sterling Ball, whose company is the world's leading maker of premium guitar strings, explains why he made the move to open source and why he's never looked back since.
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I'm told that saying no to a BSA shakedown could be considered unwise.
Edit: To elaborate a bit. I first heard of such "shakedowns" when the BSA (or their local equivalent) forced two (I think) companies to shut down around here, probably in the early 2000s. I later met with one of the people who worked at one of the companies at the time, and according to him, they could either refuse and lose business with several big customers, or play along and hope to wiggle out of the fines/fees (they were, after all, playing loose with the licenses).I don't think you get to say no to inspection here.
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@tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
pretend it's business as usual.
I wonder how many Linux converts were born that day...
If they did Mint... maybe. But they got fucking Ubuntu. I doubt people used to Windows + Visual Studio were impressed.
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@timebandit said in WTF Bites:
That sounds a lot like extortion.
The side from which I heard the story might have been a tad biased, but, yeah, it sounded a lot like that. Not sure if their customers could have been the ones to require compliance in the first place, though.
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WhoTF made the themes for Gimp 2.9, the current development version? What a monochrome unreadable mess, all the tool buttons look disabled.
Here's the old version for reference:
Fake edit: okay, I just noticed there's a separate "icon theme". I can get color icons again.
I hope they choose the better version before promoting 2.9 to stable.
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Thanks, Visual Studio.
The help button does nothing
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@zecc if you wanted that icon (FF22), I posted the .ico version:
And here's the one from FF24:
GIMP will open each icon in the group as a layer, and supports exporting to .ico when you're done also.
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@anotherusername @zecc Firefox icons through the ages...
You'll have to click "annotate" to the left then "raw" at the top, because DXR is a steaming pile, but it gets the job done.
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Do not want.
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Status: So, just to make sure that the Bluetooth issues I'm having are indeed related to my Pixel, I used my iPad to connect to my new smart lock.
It shows a connection within 2 seconds everytime I try it, from any point of my appartment.
Meanwhile, the Pixel takes upwards of 10 seconds, sometimes timing out (after 30+ seconds) even if I'm directly next to the lock. An older Android tablet doesn't find it at all.
When coupled with the other BT issues I'm having with Android, I guess that's pushing me towards iOS - because Google doesn't seem to be able to make it fucking work.
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@zecc as someone who recently installed 2.9, I agree. UX "experts" and "designers" seem to focus a lot on "consistency" but don't seem to understand what that word means beyond "everything looks kind of similar".
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Using Windows Explorer:
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Tried to create a folder called
.what ever
I got a folder named.what ever(no surprise there) -
Tried to rename the folder
.whatever
Got a popup: "You must type a filename" (I knew this would happen) -
Tried to rename the folder
.whatever.
It was renamed to.whatever(I heard this is how you create folders with a dot prefix, hence why I was experimenting) -
Tried to create a new folder called
.whatever...
"This destination already contains a folder named.whatever" "Do you still want to merge"? -
Tried to create a new folder called
Whatever...
Got a new folder namedWhatever -
Further attempts to create folders ending with multiple dots resulted in folders without dots at the end.
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Deleted folders and tried to create folder
New Folder... ...- On Windows 10: the folder is named
New Folder - On Windows 7: the new folder vanished! A refresh made it reappear, named
New Folder
- On Windows 10: the folder is named
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This happened consistently, AFAICT. Also there should be line spacing between this list item and the sub-list items above but there isn't, at least not on the post preview.
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Tried to rename the folder
New Folder... ... .... Repeatedly.- Generally I got
New Folder..., but sometimes it would vanish only to reappear after a refresh. AsNew Folder.
- Generally I got
I stopped experimenting after I crashed W10's Explorer.
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@tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
crashed W10's Explorer.
How many periods does it take to screw Explorer?
Generally it's the opposite. Screwing stops the periods.
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@tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
How many periods does it take to screw Explorer?
I think it might have been a race condition somewhere, as I was renaming the folder relatively quickly and frequently. Trying to crash it again (yes, of course I tried that) didn't work.
The whole trying to rename a folder
New Folder... ... ...giving two different results is suspicious.
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I'm thinking you can convince regular Joe Schmuck (someone with Explorer set to hide file extensions) that you've made them delete one of their folders if you tell them to rename it with a period at each end of the name.
Need to test if
.whateverfolders are hidden once I'm back on a Windows machine. I'm guessing they are.
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@zecc They're not, and the .whatever is the name not the extension. The special extension handling is probably the whole reason behind this weirdness.
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Ah. Makes ... ... ... sense.
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Is there a thread for "very stupid StackOverflow answers"?
The question:
How does cpu communicate with peripherals?
i assume cpu has direct access to motherboard's BIOS and RAM.(correct me if i'm wrong) But how does cpu communicate with other hardware like hdds, expansion cards, peripherals, other BIOSes etc.? I
The answer:
Wires! Who would have thought!
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the .whatever is the name not the extension
No. I just tried creating a text file and renaming it to
.htaccess.-- the result was a file called.htaccess(as expected). Its properties identify it as aHTACCESS File, which I associated with Notepad++. So yes, Windows is recognizing it as an extension.
Now, the 8.3 filename is
HTACCE~1(no dot), but Windows isn't using that -- it's purely there for backward compatibility. It's actually just a hard link to the file that Windows creates invisibly so that DOS programs that only work with 8.3 filenames can find and manipulate it.
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
The answer:
Wires! Who would have thought!It's not bad for a green'grocer.
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@anonymous234 said in WTF Bites:
Is there a thread for "very stupid StackOverflow answers"?
Yes. It is called "Stack Overflow".
Wait, did you meant on WTDWTF, specifically?
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WhoTF made the themes for Gimp 2.9, the current development version? What a monochrome unreadable mess, all the tool buttons look disabled.
Here's the old version for reference:
Fake edit: okay, I just noticed there's a separate "icon theme". I can get color icons again.
I hope they choose the better version before promoting 2.9 to stable.
They're imitating Adobe:
Filed Under
: It took me three tries to get the right part of Photoshop to be focused for that window screenshot.
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WhoTF made the themes for Gimp 2.9, the current development version? What a monochrome unreadable mess, all the tool buttons look disabled.
Here's the old version for reference:
Fake edit: okay, I just noticed there's a separate "icon theme". I can get color icons again.
I hope they choose the better version before promoting 2.9 to stable.
Oh wow, I just noticed that first one is a video. They're imitating Adobe badly.
But then, isn't that their entire raison d'ĂŞtre?
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@twelvebaud said in WTF Bites:
DXR
Huh, okay, so it's basically Mozilla Github?
Wait, what was that?
Zoom! Enhance!
Uh...
I guess they're running on quantum computers, allowing them to play with SchrĂśdinger's Assignment.
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Status: So, just to make sure that the Bluetooth issues I'm having are indeed related to my Pixel, I used my iPad to connect to my new smart lock.
It shows a connection within 2 seconds everytime I try it, from any point of my appartment.
Meanwhile, the Pixel takes upwards of 10 seconds, sometimes timing out (after 30+ seconds) even if I'm directly next to the lock. An older Android tablet doesn't find it at all.
When coupled with the other BT issues I'm having with Android, I guess that's pushing me towards iOS - because Google doesn't seem to be able to make it fucking work.
Alternatively, the things you're trying have only been tested with iOS and so are bug-level compatible with it.
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@zecc as someone who recently installed 2.9, I agree. UX "experts" and "designers" seem to focus a lot on "consistency" but don't seem to understand what that word means beyond "everything looks kind of similar".
I get it in this context though: there's a move toward making the thing you're working on the focus and providing a neutral background appearance for professional photo and image software, which makes it easier to focus on the work and removes problematic contrast and colors (e.g., you don't want a bright white background making it hard to see the dark areas, you don't want to get your color vision/sense skewed by the UI, etc.).
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@dreikin Can't you see? It's assigned to Nbdy, the guy who pissed off Poseidon by attacking his cyclops son.
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@tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
How many periods does it take to screw Explorer?
I think it might have been a race condition somewhere, as I was renaming the folder relatively quickly and frequently. Trying to crash it again (yes, of course I tried that) didn't work.
The whole trying to rename a folder
New Folder... ... ...giving two different results is suspicious.Did you refresh when you got
New Folder...? It might've been a delayed/missing view update, and a refresh would still have shownNew Folder.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
the .whatever is the name not the extension
No. I just tried creating a text file and renaming it to
.htaccess.-- the result was a file called.htaccess(as expected). Its properties identify it as aHTACCESS File, which I associated with Notepad++. So yes, Windows is recognizing it as an extension.Now, the 8.3 filename is
HTACCE~1(no dot), but Windows isn't using that -- it's purely there for backward compatibility. It's actually just a hard link to the file that Windows creates invisibly so that DOS programs that only work with 8.3 filenames can find and manipulate it.For files yes, but not for folders, which is what was being talked about.
