Large User Groups Cause Spontaneous Greying

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Large User Groups Cause Spontaneous Greying

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday July 6, 2004 @02:54PM from the not-so-far-fetched dept.

tiny69 writes "According to Microsoft, a Person's hair turns grey if there are more than 500 users in a User Group. Supposedly, the grey hair does not affect the functionality of the User Group. Microsoft claims to have a solution to fix the problem. How many people do you know that have hair that has turned grey? This web site has a large collection of links to humorous Microsoft Knowledge Base articles."

7 of 385 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Myself, I like... by herrvinny · 2004-07-06 15:01 · Score: 4, Informative

Myself, I like Calculator Does Not Reliably Subtract Two Numbers in Windows

Then what's the point of using a calculator in the first place?
1. Re:Myself, I like... by unixbum · 2004-07-06 15:37 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Myself, I like Calculator Does Not Reliably Subtract Two Numbers in Windows
  Probably get marked troll for this but, taken off the supplied link.
  The information in this article applies to:
  Microsoft Windows 3.0
  Microsoft Windows 3.0a
  Microsoft Windows 3.1
  Microsoft Windows 3.11
  Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.1
  Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11
  
  This bug only affects Windows 3.0-3.11
2. Re:Myself, I like... by acm · 2004-07-06 16:19 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Raymond Chen had a good blog entry about that problem here:
  The innards of Calc - the arithmetic engine - was completely thrown away and rewritten from scratch. The standard IEEE floating point library was replaced with an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. This was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn't do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 - 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016.
  (These all came from people who didn't understand how computers handle floating point. I have a future entry planned to go into floating point representations in more detail.)
  Today, Calc's internal computations are done with infinite precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators).
why would joe sixpack be managing a domain? by SuperBanana · 2004-07-06 15:21 · Score: 4, Informative

How in the world do you expect the mythical "Joe Sixpack" to manage that?
Why would the mythical Joe Sixpack be managing a computer or domain with 500 users, and further, be bothered enough by the different icon color? A company with 500 windows users damn well better have an experienced windows tech.
It's probably there to help some poor geek in a fortune-500 whose PHB declares, "fix that" and makes him waste a week on it so the department looks busy.

--
Please help metamoderate.
It's not really a joke... by LostCluster · 2004-07-06 16:28 · Score: 5, Informative

The icon hair color changes from dark to gray in order to indicate that the statuses aren't going to be queried in advance of the user wanting to see details on the group... it's not really an easter egg, it's a feature. Gray is the color in the computer world to indicate such inactive states, isn't it?
Re:Calculator - Missing Sqrt, Arc-trig functions by general_re · 2004-07-06 17:00 · Score: 4, Informative

Yeah, and the Windows calculator is also way too big and heavy to hang from your belt loop or put in your pocket.
Seriously, get real for a minute - it's purely a convenience thing, not something intended to be a full-blown replacement for your HP-48 or whatever. People who need full-fledged scientific calculators probably already have one to begin with, and therefore just about nobody is going to care that you can't do arctans in the Windows calc. And the very few who do demand such things on their desktops can readily find more advanced calculators elsewhere.

--
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Re:Calculator - Missing Sqrt, Arc-trig functions by TwistedSquare · 2004-07-06 20:38 · Score: 5, Informative

how do you do arc-trig functions? ... No hyperbolic trig functions, either.
Look on the top left of the calculator in scientific mode. There is an "inv" tickbox and a "hyp" one. To get arc-trig, tick the inv box, then click sin. Likewise, sinh can be performed by ticking hyp then pressing sin. Not the most obvious solution but not too bad either imho.