Nonsense page 7
Computers. The technological wonder of flawless precision and logic, honed by computer scientists over the decades. And just as capable of spouting complete nonsense as the best of us.
The first a screenshot from Mackie showing Safari having downloaded far more of a file than is actually possible:
In a similar vein, here is Windows printing page 3 of 2:
This next one is rather strange. If you look at the graph of battery usage, we’re at about 35%. The information on the right says something completely different:
The 91% figure comes from the operating system, but where then did the usage graph come from? As far as I can tell, the 91% figure is complete nonsense made up by the operating system, because it has been a while since I charged the batteries.
Triggering a manual refresh of the graph causes ChaDis to retract the usage graph, deciding itself that it cannot be real:
The following screenshot comes from Shinaku, who writes, “Copying Serial ATA drivers over for a PC I’m building, it took ages to complete the file transfer, then only showed that.”
The following appeared when performing batch file renaming, where one of the files was to be given a name longer than the Macintosh limit of 31 characters:
This error is emitted by the Finder in its AppleEvent handler, if you ask GraphicConverter to rename via IPC to the Finder. The reason for this painfully high-latency approach is to preserve file comments, which are tied to a file’s name and are lost on a standard rename! If you batch rename to an overly-long name using regular ToolBox calls, this equally useless message appears:
I think the error they wanted was -37 (Bad filename), not whatever on earth the above error means. Note also the differing quotation mark styles in the message.
I am not sure what triggered the following, but the displayed cursor co-ordinates relative to the image are remarkably suspect:
Annoyingly, GraphicConverter uses (1, 1) as the origin, so after spending a while trying to position the cursor at (0, 0), you realise that it’s impossible.
The following is from JensenDied, brought up during an IRC conversation:
I received the following from Ben at StupidFish via Mackie:
Also from Mackie, he was intrigued about the meaning of a “broken pipe”:
I find it hard to believe that the Fount of All Technical Knowledge™ has no idea what a broken pipe is, but the average computer user will be most mystified. At a guess, the Finder uses hdiutil to mount disc images and the pipe broke when hdiutil bailed from this corrupt disc image.