@lolwtf said:
Instead of comfy chair, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again.
It's like Godwin's Law, but instead of Hitler it's xkcd references.
@lolwtf said:
Instead of comfy chair, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again.
It's like Godwin's Law, but instead of Hitler it's xkcd references.
@Rycochet said:
Actually there is a flatscreen TV out there that is a mirror when turned off... Can't remember who makes it, but can remember the blurb.
Reminds me of the LG Shine in a way.
@Nether said:
Obviously your server doesn't contain enough chronobytes to store a whole year of time.But what seems missing here is that you imply that your company only keeps critical accounting data on backup for a month.
Assuming that older accounting tables are not deleted and continue to be backed up, that shouldn't be a major concern.
@AssimilatedByBorg said:
I would be curious to know if the "EULA can change at any time with no notice" terms have ever been upheld in court. Well, even if that term is crap, the judge would almost certainly just tell the publisher that the changes are null and void, but the original terms still apply.
I don't think a contract can change without the agreement of both parties (common sense, optimism that the US legal system isn't entirely fucked, etc.). Since these EULAs say they can change "with no notice," I think yes, that would logically void any changes made.
@Spectre said:
@curtmack said:1. Start the activation wizard.
2. Choose "I want to activate Windows XP over the telephone."
3. Click "Get new product key."
4. Enter in your new license key and press enter.
5. Close out of the program.
6. Restart the activation wizard.
7. Choose "I want to activate Windows XP over the Internet."
8. God willing, it should work now.Or you could change the key in the registry.
Or slipstream SP3.
<font size="1">Or use Vista.</font>
All valid solutions, to be sure. I was mostly curious as to why you can only enter a new key if you're activating over the telephone, when the product key is equally important for Internet activation. The average liberal arts major from southeast Nebraska does not know how to alter the registry.
So I needed to reinstall Windows XP recently (my old hard drive crashed and burned, and it wasn't worth the trouble recovering data). The problem is, I have a restrictive student license, and I can only install it once. To install it again I need to request a new license key. No big deal, it's free, but in the meantime, I need Windows XP up and running for Visual Studio. Since it gives you 30 days to activate it, I decide to install it again anyway.
When it brings up the "Enter product key" page, it doesn't give you an option to activate later. So I enter in my old license key, hoping that will shut it up. I get the expected "XP could not be activated, you have 30 days to activate it" message and it boots up just fine.
Well, today I got my new license key, and I went to the activation wizard to activate it. Sure enough, it says "XP could not be activated, you have 28 days to activate it." I try multiple times, search the registry, everything.
Here's how I finally figure out how to put in a new license key:
1. Start the activation wizard.
2. Choose "I want to activate Windows XP over the telephone."
3. Click "Get new product key."
4. Enter in your new license key and press enter.
5. Close out of the program.
6. Restart the activation wizard.
7. Choose "I want to activate Windows XP over the Internet."
8. God willing, it should work now.
@morbiuswilters said:
UA sniffing is sometimes necessary to work around browser bugs. That standards compliance will automatically make everything work perfectly is a ridiculous myth that people need to stop propagating. The only WTF here is that Google didn't test their own browser beforehand and add it to the UA sniffing code.
Real purpose of standards compliance: passing the buck. "You're right, my page looks like a flaming pile of crap in X browser. But X browser doesn't support <table>'s correctly! How am I supposed to do good work when I have to listen to other people's standards as well as my own?!"
This happened on #debian yesterday. You can't help but feel sorry for the guy who has to fix this mess...
9:26 < jwisher> I made a useraccount, when I su to it, the console outputs "bash: /dev/null: Permission denied" about 100 times. any idea how I can find the cause?
19:27 < peppe> jwisher: that doesn't sound good, ls -l /dev/null ?
19:27 < jwisher> "crwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1, 3 2007-11-13 21:33 /dev/null"
19:27 < jwisher> is that the right settngs?
19:28 < peppe> jwisher: not at all, it should be 666
19:28 < curtmack> sudo chmod 666 /dev/null
19:28 < curtmack> should clear it up
19:28 < peppe> jwisher: what's going on on your system? did you modify it?
19:28 < jwisher> a new admin decided to chmod/chown /
19:28 < curtmack> chmod -R?
19:29 < jwisher> yes
19:29 < curtmack> that's, uh, bad
All of the files in /dev, /home, /usr, etc, set not only so that they can only be written to by their owner (which, if this genius of an admin also chowned them, would be root), but so they can be executed. What fun!
Not content to celebrate the 25th birthday of the Famicom (7/15/83) like a normal person (you know, not at all), Sean Kelly did what any devoted fan would do: he made a homebrew ROM in celebration...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=X6pLE03e8ew
@RandomViewer said:
if "Group for the Research of Neuroscience Cognitivique" is the actual name that has an acronym, why didn't they use the actual name instead of translating it....is that not the normal thing to do? i mean would you translate "Nation Rifle Association" to "Association de national" or some weird shit like that...when you were doing an article on it?
Actually, translating it is the normal thing to do. The FIDE is always called the World Chess Federation in English, even though it's still called FIDE ("Fedaracion Internationale Du Esches" or something like that) when abbreviated, for example.
@flobi said:
Strange, until you said that, I didn't even realized there was [b]such[/b] a forum on this site.
There, I fixed it. Of course anyone who actually thought about it would've known what was intended, but hey, why bother thinking when you can just assume everyone means exactly what they say and nobody ever makes mistakes?
@danixdefcon5 said:
Anyway, I find it so funny that there seems to be a large market of bottled water in the US ... last time I checked, tap water quality over there is actually decent; yet there are zillions of sales in bottled water and water purifier filters.
I suggest likewise, MasterPlanSoftware.
@tchize said:
There are 3 verbs in this page, out of which one has 2 mistakes! appoligize?
Not to be a stickler, but there are four verbs. You're forgetting that "is" is a verb.
I'm reminded of that one episode of Family Guy:
"Hey Lois, remember that time we (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) behind the (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) in the (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) with the (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) baseball bat (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) gloves (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) blood everywhere (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) locusts (This text has been withheld because of exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act 2000) Firefly" etc.
@Crispy Duck said:
There have been double-blind trials of this sort of thing, but many audiophiles / audiofools label themselves as 'subjectivists', which basically seems to mean that if they believe that something improves the sound from their system, then it really does, even if they can't actually tell the difference in a DBT.
Is this the same reason FLAC audio format has taken off? 1200 kb/s sound that's indistinguishable from a 300 kb/s MP3. Way to go.
@zzo38 said:
Maybe this is not the TRWTF
This may be the first time I've seen RAS Syndrome before the acronym.
As for grandparents doing stuff with computers, one of my Grandpa's first jobs out of the military was selling software for airports. He went around with his 80's portable computer and demonstrated the software to airports around the country. Nowadays he still toys with his computer (most recently a *groan* Dell running *groan* Windows Vista, but he still has his old HP Windows XP).
By the way, he still has the portable PC (he was allowed to keep it after the company went bankrupt). We dragged it out a few months ago for fun. It weighs a ton, the screen is tiny, and it doesn't really work anymore; seems the hard drive is corrupt (exposure to one too many airport metal detectors?). But it boots off of a floppy just fine, and its fun just watching how slowly it runs.
@MasterPlanSoftware said:
@DOA said:
However it also means that you wont get shot in a road rage incident.Unless that person illegally has a gun. Also, defense against an armed person isnt limited to him having a gun. What if he has a baseball bat? Will you stand there and be beaten to death?A normal person does not stand much of a chance against a raging lunatic with a baseball bat. I, for one, prefer to know that if such an individual is threatening my life (newsflash: you can kill someone very easily with your HANDS, let alone a blunt object) I have a way to defend myself. Perhaps your strict laws and lack of freedom have made it such that you are unconcerned about losing your life in your everyday commute, but I have a little more hope left I guess.
So wait, wait. Here's your argument:
1. Tighter gun laws may reduce, but do not completely eliminate, gun crime.
2. Therefore tighter gun laws are worthless.
So on that line of reasoning...
1. Murder laws may reduce, but do not completely eliminate, murder.
2. Therefore murder laws are worthless.
Or hell, let's go all the way:
1. Criminal laws may reduce, but do not completely eliminate, the crimes to which they pertain.
2. Therefore criminal law is worthless.
While on the topic, I also like your implication that the only means of self-defense is a gun. You're quite right, there is absolutely no other way around it; regardless of all the ways of killing people you listed in your post, guns are simply the only way to go when it comes to partially killing someone.@jreasons68 said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Hint: When "he" tells you he's a woman, it's generally not a good idea to go home with "him".
Now that's funny. Then again... there are some pretty attractive she-males out there.
Bridget?
Anyway, while on the topic of high school, a minor WTF happened this year at my high school.
They replaced the beloved ulocker system with a new "DocuShare" system. Now there's nothing really wrong with DocuShare (nothing really right with it either), but ulocker was rather simple to use. When you log onto a school computer, you're connected to a network folder that only you can access. There were also instructions for connecting to it from a home computer (on Win98, WinXP, or Mac OSX, anyway), and if all else failed there was a browser interface for it.
However, DocuShare is confusing. It took most of the students the better part of first semester to figure out how to upload files to their DocuShare: you have to click a link on the page, which takes you to a page where you can upload files. Two problems:
1. Your "Personal Collection" is displayed on your front page. Why do you have to click a link to go to your "Personal Collection" again to upload files?
2. If you hover over this link, the icon next to it is also underlined, and vice-versa. The icon is also a link. It does not go to the same place.
And, surprise: nobody - teacher, librarian, resident IT guy, nobody - ever explained how to use DocuShare at all, other than how to get to it, how to log on, and how to upload files to a teacher's "dropbox" (for handing in assignments). Because of this, many students were actually using teachers' folders for storing their files. (Mostly the teachers didn't care.)
And in case you're wondering, how are you supposed to get to DocuShare?
1. Go to school district's webpage.
2. Go to the "Search" feature.
3. Type in "docshare3" and press Enter. Sometimes you have to press it twice, for reasons no one really knows.
4. It will take you to the login page.
Or, my version:
1. Enter "docshare3.schooldistrict.com" and press Enter.
And why docshare3? Well, docushare and docshare2 take you to the staff version. docshare1 does not exist, but "docshare" takes you to a lovely "Apache server installation successful" page. (And yes, all of the manual links work.)
@MasterPlanSoftware said:
OH NOES! They took their site down for maintenance!
The subject line basically reveals what the WTF is and you still missed it? That's a whole new level of missing the point.
Reminds me of those old sites where, to download something, the site would wait 15 seconds to a minute (depending on the site) to display the link so that the ad companies give them more money... but anyone with basic HTML knowledge could open the source, where the link could usually be found right at the beginning as a simple javascript variable. I'd gotten that technique down to 6 seconds before most sites started obfuscating the variable ({'h','t','t','p',':','/','/','w', etc.).
@fatdog said:
@bstorer said:
Hamster wheels and cell phones dangling just out of reach?
Well, you will have to take into the equation the power of lazziness. But it's a good starting point. Maybe make those cells I-phones?
How audible is the iPhone's speaker? We could have it play J-pop. Maybe carmelldansen?
This one's also good:
> + for (; nconds > 0; )
And the lord cried "while"!
@WeatherGod said:
I am surprised they didn't start extolling the benefits of using frames.
Frames don't hold a candle to some of the WTFs in this site... The text in the buttons doesn't actually remain in the buttons, spilling out onto the white background where it has to be selected to be read, the text size is too big on Firefox and looks like an "I can read too!" book for preschoolers, the "Welcome" line features marquee text, the highlighted text comes in the most attrocious color scheme I have yet to see (red on yellow), and the headers come in yellow on red (which is not that much better, but at least it doesn't burn my eyeballs out). The only thing its missing is embedded MIDI and animation abuse. Let's open up the hood...
Made by Frontpage Express, with not even enough care to fill in the description or keywords meta fields. Or the ALT text on any of the images. God help you if you visit this page in Lynx, because to the National Tap Dance Copmany you don't deserve to navigate their site. Which is a pity because I'm pretty sure it's the only way most people could stomach it. Also, all of the email addresses are muxed, which I guess is standard practice nowadays but I personally find it funny that a professional organization which is so powerful hackers fall to naught at their mere word would openly admit that they've had difficulties with script kiddies running google bots to harvest spam addresses. Surely they'd blame the fact that their front page is a mere .htm (not even .html!).
@GettinSadda said:
@curtmack said:
Even though I'm not a web developer (shock horror, yes not all visitors here are web developers!) I figured out that was roughly what the info was, but not how you craft it into a url.@GettinSadda said:
Umm... it's a session ID... how else do you get a Session ID?How did you get that full URL?
It is not the one linked from the Renault site
Do some browsers show it in the address bar when you visit the page (Firefox doesn't), or is it just a 133t h4x0r trick that any n00b should know?
Nothing to do with browser. Some sites are stupid and put session ID information in the URL.
All I was saying is that he got a session ID by registering and being assigned a Session ID. Or he got the link from someone who did, etc.
@GettinSadda said:
How did you get that full URL?
It is not the one linked from the Renault site
Umm... it's a session ID... how else do you get a Session ID?
No, you're not missing anything, I just thought it was a really stupid design. And I didn't know there had been that many others like it.
This.
Sure it works. As long as you have a conventional CD tray and not one of those newfangled slot-loaders.
You're forgetting that POV-Ray doesn't define many datatypes. Floats, vectors (which are just lists of floats), and text strings. That's it.
Sure it could define a boolean, but why? POV-Ray wasn't designed to do a whole lot of branching. If the overhead problems with using floats as booleans become a major issue, you're doing something wrong. Heck, you want to know what if statements look like in POV-Ray?
#declare this_variable = 1;
#if (this_variable == 1) {
//let's draw a sphere because this_variable is totally 1
sphere { <0,2,0>,1
pigment { color rgb <1,0,0> }
// etc.
}
#else
//this_variable isn't 1 so we'll draw a box instead
box { <-1,-1,-1>,<1,1,1>
pigment { color rgb <0,1,0> }
// etc.
}
#end
Yep, all variable and branching work is handled as preprocessor directives when POV-Ray tokenizes the input file. The raytracer never even sees them.
Saw this on http://www.consumer.gov/weightloss/bmi.htm when I was looking up the formula to calculate Body Mass Index. It's well known that Javascript's round() function doesn't allow the coder to specify how many decimal places to round out to. Still, this is solved easily by something like round(num*100)/100, for example. Apparently the coder of cal_bmi() didn't like how hackish that solution seemed, and instead did this...
function cal_bmi(lbs, ins)
{
h2 = ins * ins;
bmi = lbs/h2 * 703;
f_bmi = Math.floor(bmi);
diff = bmi - f_bmi;
diff = diff * 10;
diff = Math.round(diff);
if (diff == 10)
{
// Add up to next
f_bmi += 1;
diff = 0;
}
bmi = f_bmi + "." + diff;
return bmi;
}