explain xkcd:Museum

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Title text: Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created BY AN INTERNET GRANDPA. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic shows how likely it is that a bug reported will be fixed, based on the age of some past post that matches your search for details of the problem.

A table is shown below of the explanations of each table row:

Age of post	Explanation given	Full Explanation
2 hours ago	A service outage. Not very long to fix - Just wait.	The recentness of the information implies that it has just happened, and other people have noticed it and started to post about the issue. Large-scale problems like a service outage are obvious priorities, and will (hopefully!) be fixed quickly.
5 days ago	A new update just broke something big. High chance to be fixed, but you might have to wait for a patch	Similar to before, a large breakage would be very high priority to be fixed. However, as it's been five days since reporting it, the bug is likely taking a while to be found, so - as pointed out in the comic - you could have to wait a bit longer for this one to be resolved.
3 months ago	A new product isn't working for some users. Decent chance of finding a solution in replies	This problem is clearly not considered a priority for a fix by the creators, judging by how long it's been there. It possibly isn't an issue affecting everyone, or even a large proportion of users. However, people are innovative, and someone may well have found their own fix, patch or kludge to get around the product limitations.
2 years ago	You've run into an edge case. Low chance to be fixed, but the replies could help with troubleshooting	An edge case is a rare situation that the developers did not think to account for, usually causing a logic error, where the program works, but outputs something unexpected which might cause an error down the line. Very few people will suffer from this precise problem, which may mean that it's not considered worth the effort to apply a fix. The developers or other users may have encountered similar issues on this or similar software, and noting how they solved those problems might lead you towards how to solve your own.
13 years ago	You're the only one with this problem. Very Low chance to be fixed, and the post is likely irrelevant	A post of this age likely predates the software you're using, or at least the current version of it. It's probably a coincidental match to your search query, and doesn't actually relate to the problem you've encountered. Since no-one else has posted about this issue or anything similar within a recent timeframe, it's likely that you're the first person (or at least, one of very few people) to have come across it.
24 years ago	Oh god how is the Internet so old. Maybe whoever posted the message's children can help you out.	This is another comic where Randall makes people feel old, in this case by pointing out that the Internet is very old, and people posting comments in the early period of the Internet have now had time to have kids who have reached an age where they are themselves posting. It is also (presumably) rare enough to be a DenverCoder9 situation, and 13 years is longer than the time in that comic, so 13 years might be such a situation too. The Internet is, in fact, over forty years old — significantly older than this notional post. The World Wide Web (to many, synonymous with the Internet) hails from the early 1990s, and Google (one of the more commonly used search engines, through which this error search might have been made) was launched in the late 1990s. The biggest surprise might be that some information published on a webpage in 2002 (and still relevant to your search) survives on some still live web server (or as an archive of that original information on some successor site). For example, anything hosted on a GeoCities site would have normally been made inaccessible in 2014.
Title text	Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.	The title text appears to be a conversation taking place in a distant future with the descendant of an ancient internet post. The 'last living descendant' is a common trope in fiction where arcane knowledge is passed down through a family line (often on the previous generation's deathbed). The suggestion is that the solution to the user's issue is a closely guarded secret that has had to be kept safe in this way.

Transcript

This is one of 45 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Implications of the age of the posts you see when you Google an error message

[A search engine prompt field is shown, containing part of an error code message (beginning with E-21 & what looks like a 9 & 3 next to it). Below this are search results shown as obscured text, except for a the phrase '3 years ago' in the first heading. This is expanded into an ellipse that obscures the rest of the search field.]

[A table, with 3 columns, labelled "Age of post", "What it means", and "Probability of a fix"]

[Row 1: Age of post:] 2 hours ago

[What it means:] There's an infrastructure outage

[Probability of a fix:] Very high -- just wait

[Row 2: Age of post:] 5 days ago

[What it means:] A recent update broke something big

[Probability of a fix:] High, but you might have to wait for a patch

[Row 3: Age of post:] 3 months ago

[What it means:] A new product isn't working for some users

[Probability of a fix:] Decent chance of a solution in the replies

[Row 4: Age of post:] 2 years ago

[What it means:] You've run into an edge case

[Probability of a fix:] Low, but maybe the replies can help with troubleshooting

[Row 5: Age of post:] 13 years ago

[What it means:] You're the only person with this problem

[Probability of a fix:] Very low -- post is likely not relevant

[Row 6: Age of post:] 24 years ago

[What it means:] Oh God how is the Internet this old

[Probability of a fix:] Maybe whoever posted this message has kids who can help you

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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