BiggerBoat posted:I finally saw one of those TV screen display things on a refrigerator out in the wild and it still seems like the stupidest loving thing and one of the biggest wastes of money I can imagine. The thing where they keep the beer and the Gatorade and poo poo in the beverage aisle but all the doors have a big digital display of what's supposed to be inside. https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-20-e-04-dana-carvey-edie-brickell Starts at 6m30s Watermelon Daiquiri fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jul 1, 2022 |
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Jul 1, 2022 20:41
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Watermelon Daiquiri posted:https://archive.org/details/saturday-night-live-s-20-e-04-dana-carvey-edie-brickell Is that not Michael McKean?
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Jul 1, 2022 20:47
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Didnt RoosterTeeth and some other youtubers do the digital car thing. Granted I think it was more like "can you 3rd person drive a car good?"
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Jul 1, 2022 20:48
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Not to beat the screen thing dead since it’s one of the three things this thread talks about alongside Tesla and JavaScript but the last time I saw the screens they were showing ads so I truly had to just start randomly opening doors cause I couldn’t tell where anything was. So stupid
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Jul 1, 2022 20:50
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is that not Michael McKean? It is Michael McKean. He was on for two seasons.
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Jul 1, 2022 20:53
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There's freezer screens at a wallgreens by me, but they're just set to a generic animated ice cream being scooped loop, not ads or specific products. It seems super pointless unless it's somehow better insulation
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Jul 1, 2022 20:53
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BiggerBoat posted:I finally saw one of those TV screen display things on a refrigerator out in the wild and it still seems like the stupidest loving thing and one of the biggest wastes of money I can imagine. The thing where they keep the beer and the Gatorade and poo poo in the beverage aisle but all the doors have a big digital display of what's supposed to be inside. It's for advertising. When you've got screens on the freezer doors, then it's easier to sell ad space on the freezer doors, and you can charge more too.
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Jul 1, 2022 20:53
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Main Paineframe posted:It's for advertising. When you've got screens on the freezer doors, then it's easier to sell ad space on the freezer doors, and you can charge more too. Who buys that ad space though? As odd as it sounds, there are limits to what ad agencies consider space worth buying. There's a company around here that does urinals that also play ads. 95% of the time they just read: "your ad could be here. Call now!" Emperor Vespasian claimed money doesn't smell, but apparently there is a point when monetization just becomes too weird.
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Jul 2, 2022 00:14
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My favourite example of ignoring things that should be usability requirements is the Garmin GTN650/750 GPS. It's an aviation GPS, and by all accounts it's exceptional except for one very, very significant flaw. You see, like most new devices, they thought: touchscreens are great, we'll use one of those for all the main functions. It works great in a simulator, it works great on the ground, but... add in some light to moderate turbulence in flight, all of a sudden that touchscreen is absolutely gently caress useless, and you're trying to brace your hand against something else in the cockpit to have a hope of pressing the parts of the screen you intend to touch while avoiding the ones you don't mean to touch. Touchscreens are a cancer because to too many designers it meant "great, we never have to worry about usability again, people can just touch everything!"
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Jul 2, 2022 00:22
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HootTheOwl posted:Nah, it's about down time, cost, and funcationality. Old systems also can cost a lot more to maintain though. My aunt did very, very well for herself into her 70's because she spent her entire career as a programmer for the DoD and by the end of her career nobody else knew the old systems or could get around in COBOL/FORTRAN so even after retirement she was getting very lucrative contracting gigs since no young programmer was going to bother learning the ancient poo poo. She cost significantly more than bringing in an extra hand to help with a modern system would have.
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Jul 2, 2022 01:29
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Tuxedo Gin posted:She cost significantly more than bringing in an extra hand to help with a modern system would have. Yet much less than the latter person PLUS writing a new system PLUS migrating to it. Which is the entire point.
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Jul 2, 2022 01:35
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For government and financial and health care uses, yes. Other industries don't give a poo poo about stability or security and can roll out a new system cheaply by using fresh grads that don't know what they're doing. I guess financial institutions do that too, considering some of the breaches we've seen.
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Jul 2, 2022 01:40
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Motronic posted:Yet much less than the latter person PLUS writing a new system PLUS migrating to it. I'd also argue there's an ideal time to write a new system and migrate to it, and if you're much past that, it's going to be far harder and far more expensive. A lot of the particularly old systems under discussion have passed that point by decades.
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Jul 2, 2022 02:05
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Tuxedo Gin posted:For government and financial and health care uses, yes. Other industries don't give a poo poo about stability or security and can roll out a new system cheaply by using fresh grads that don't know what they're doing. I guess financial institutions do that too, considering some of the breaches we've seen. right on the one hand, lol that the feds use a computer system so fragile it just has scheduled breakage time during a full moon and nobody knows why and nobody's ever figured it out. on the other hand, private industries rolling out system after system is how you end up with white collar computer touchers spending a decent amount of their time weekly just navigating a jungle of apps, platforms, and systems to find basic information in the contemporary virtual workspace https://twitter.com/gossipbabies/status/1487161069143576576 at my office, payroll is one system, HR and management is another, community file sharing is a third. we use slack AND teams, there are two different slacks, old tickets are in jira but older tickets are in salesforce, and new tickets are in salesforce also, and all the tickets 2009-2017 are in an ancient fogbugz instance a few people only run locally on a VM because it isn't worth hosting the image on azure. two jira projects exist for customer requests, the one you're not supposed to start new tickets in and the one you can start new tickets in but you need to scour the old one first to see if there are any duplicates and link them. and this is just the poo poo that matters to me, there are a loving lot of apps on my SSO dashboard which i have no idea what they do because they're for completely different departments Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jul 2, 2022 |
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Jul 2, 2022 03:17
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IME just submit a ticket in the ServiceNow Employee Center and play dumb and they will figure out how to do whatever it is you need to do. My colleagues are trying to figure out stupid poo poo in Workday or iPay or Degreed or whatever while I just submit a ticket and crack a beer. withak fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Jul 2, 2022 |
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Jul 2, 2022 04:49
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Meaty Ore posted:I'm not in the tech sector, but isn't security part of the reason banks and government agencies run so much old computer stuff? Being more difficult to hack because nobody knows/studies/uses this stuff anymore, or something like that? There is a banking 'core' system that processes all the transactions and account balances. These are often older systems (proven track records are important here), and they're often hosted on premise. That means there are also big infrastructure investments that take a long time to pay off. On top of that core, there is an application layer that provides the customer experience when you're on the bank's website or mobile app. Attached to that application layer, there's integrated solutions for remote check deposits, automated bill pay, money transfer apps, managing credit cards, applying for credit cards/loans and so on. It is tough to upgrade the core or application layer without affecting all those integrated solutions too, so there's a big barrier to change. And because it's people's money, there's a very low tolerance for downtime or errors.
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Jul 2, 2022 05:47
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Have Some Flowers! posted:At least in the case of banks, it's a huge tangle of integrated systems that rest on a legacy foundation. Whenever I've gone in to the bank and sat with a "specialist" to do something a little more complicated like link accounts or get finance or close accounts, they do a whole heap of web based magic but every single time there's a brief foray into a VT-100 terminal to talk to some ancient mainframe. Ditto with mobile phones. I've gone into JB-Hifi (Australian version of I guess best buy) who are a Telstra (dominant telco) reseller and it's the same deal. A whole heap of web interface magic and then some ancient back end system to I suppose activate a SIM card or something.
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Jul 2, 2022 08:46
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I bet it's not uncommon for people in positions of importance to have access to systems and UIs that basically do the same poo poo but are way easier to use than what the ones in the trenches have to deal with.
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Jul 2, 2022 08:57
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For my internship I had a stint at the software development corner for the revenue management dept. of a certain airline and I remember you'd have webapps running in C# or whatever. To get flight information from SABRE, you'd connect to a remote terminal session and parse out the output. I made a really nice state machine for parsing that output. Obviously there was no docs so I had to figure out what meant what from looking at it and asking people what they knew things meant. Also IIRC these sessions were limited per department, so you'd need to contact a Java web service that handed out session tickets from a department-wide pool. The joke was even if you properly released the ticket the Java application didn't actually have a way to actually end the terminal session so even if the ticket returned to the pool if you did things too fast the sessions would be exhausted (or rather you'd get an invalid session) until they timed out on their own and SABRE gave fresh ones and then the whole department's apps would start having trouble. I discovered this after I tried to optimize an application that needed to request flight route data for dozens of different routes but each session could only do one at a time so it'd take like 30 minutes for the thing to complete. I did a simple parallelization and it worked great until it didn't because the sessions ran out because releasing them didn't do poo poo. Oops. IIRC the solution was to just tune it down until I stopped using up terminal sessions faster than they timed out. I think the magic number was 3 or such. What's double funny is that somebody had already tried that but a bug in some XSD meant C# XML deserialization didn't work so somebody patched it to use a static debug variable to get the raw XML and parse it manually. Obviously this meant locking the requests so despite being ostensibly parallel it still ended up doing everything serially. Fixing that involved getting the generated source for the deserializer, stepping until I found the offending line, discovering that Sabre was providing a flawed XSD, raging at them for a while, then installing a transformation thingy to add the missing namespace to the incoming XML. Anyways airline core systems might be solid but everything else is sticks and gum. A classmate that also interned there made a script to reboot a server every 30min because it'd crash otherwise.
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Jul 2, 2022 11:03
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I bet it's not uncommon for people in positions of importance to have access to systems and UIs that basically do the same poo poo but are way easier to use than what the ones in the trenches have to deal with. If management wanted to keep a bunch of extra white collars around that would be the way to do it. More likely those systems don't exist but it's a lot less frustrating to management because they simply delegate the work and don't deal with it or have the slightest idea how to do it
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Jul 2, 2022 11:28
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Yeah, the idea that "people of importance" would ever dirty their hands touching a computer instead of paying someone else to do it made me laugh.
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Jul 2, 2022 11:46
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Clarste posted:Yeah, the idea that "people of importance" would ever dirty their hands touching a computer instead of paying someone else to do it made me laugh. The types of Vladimir Putin don't even have smartphones or use Internet, they just have everything printed for them and dictate their messages.
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Jul 2, 2022 11:51
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PT6A posted:Touchscreens are a cancer because to too many designers it meant "great, we never have to worry about usability again, people can just touch everything!" One of my fave examples of this was during the early part of the covid pandemic when several big supermarkets here loudly announced how they were ensuring customers could pay with contactless so you wouldn't need to touch stuff, except it was very obviously just PR that they didn't bother thinking through or ever get called on, because you still had to touch a gross touchscreen in order to select the contactless option.
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Jul 2, 2022 12:13
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PT6A posted:My favourite example of ignoring things that should be usability requirements is the Garmin GTN650/750 GPS. It's an aviation GPS, and by all accounts it's exceptional except for one very, very significant flaw. You see, like most new devices, they thought: touchscreens are great, we'll use one of those for all the main functions. It doesn't work well even on ground if your touchscreen gets wet or snowy or dirty... which is not rare when roaming the outdoors. Or if you are wearing normal gloves. A physical interface is always better for wilderness unless you are having a light stroll in perfect weather.
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Jul 2, 2022 12:19
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I bet it's not uncommon for people in positions of importance to have access to systems and UIs that basically do the same poo poo but are way easier to use than what the ones in the trenches have to deal with. Why would you think that? What would the benefit be of keeping these "better" interfaces from the technical people? My experience with this is more like having a web interface for first level support that reduces training requirements and potential damage they can do but by definition limits the scope of what they can do while everyone else with the right skillset is using a much more rudimentary and/or command line based UI or doing things like directly editing config files and databases.
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Jul 2, 2022 16:28
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Was thinking more that the people doing the actual work are having to constantly jump through hoops for permission to do their drat job every day while higher management has permissions that bypass all of that and see no reason why there could even be a problem.
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Jul 2, 2022 17:12
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Was thinking more that the people doing the actual work are having to constantly jump through hoops for permission to do their drat job every day while higher management has permissions that bypass all of that and see no reason why there could even be a problem. I don't know what industry you're imagining this happening in, but just lol that you think upper management would know enough to do any of this or even be able to delegate permissions as appropriate. In anything tech or tech adjacent (so probalby anything at all the involves "permissions") at best you'll have front line managers who know what's going on who are able to raise tickets to get approval for ICs to get the permissions they need (to which some senior manager or director will just blindly smash the "approve" button for). Anyone above that isn't likely to know the details of how any system works to any extent. Management should also be given the limited-feature-set kiddie interface that the first level support and interns get for the same reasons: to limit the damage they can (and will) do.
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Jul 2, 2022 17:24
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uggy posted:Not to beat the screen thing dead since it’s one of the three things this thread talks about alongside Tesla and JavaScript but the last time I saw the screens they were showing ads so I truly had to just start randomly opening doors cause I couldn’t tell where anything was. So stupid
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Jul 3, 2022 02:17
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PT6A posted:My favourite example of ignoring things that should be usability requirements is the Garmin GTN650/750 GPS. It's an aviation GPS, and by all accounts it's exceptional except for one very, very significant flaw. You see, like most new devices, they thought: touchscreens are great, we'll use one of those for all the main functions. I think it was Jaguar who had an issue like that with their centre console touch screen. When parked, it was all very easy to use but, when driving, people would naturally try to brace their thumb against the console to stabilise their hand enough to press the tiny buttons. Only it turned out, the precise place people put their thump was also the engine stop/start button, meaning people were turning off the engine while trying to change the radio station.
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Jul 3, 2022 14:10
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Megillah Gorilla posted:I think it was Jaguar who had an issue like that with their centre console touch screen. When parked, it was all very easy to use but, when driving, people would naturally try to brace their thumb against the console to stabilise their hand enough to press the tiny buttons. I don't see the problem here. if the user accidentally presses the engine stop button while the car is rolling they can simply press the engine start button again to correct it. support ticket closed
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Jul 3, 2022 22:18
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Megillah Gorilla posted:I think it was Jaguar who had an issue like that with their centre console touch screen. When parked, it was all very easy to use but, when driving, people would naturally try to brace their thumb against the console to stabilise their hand enough to press the tiny buttons. LUCAS UI
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Jul 4, 2022 06:17
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https://twitter.com/DrChoom/status/1544367897841176576?t=LfSEQ26uxDr5gutTm8-fmw&s=19
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Jul 5, 2022 20:04
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Can't you just reboot the car if Netflix freezes?
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Jul 5, 2022 20:43
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withak posted:Can't you just reboot the car if Netflix freezes?  just say that again, out loud, to yourself
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Jul 5, 2022 21:04
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And if it's really bad, just take the battery out of the car, wait a few seconds, put the battery back in, and restart everything!
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Jul 5, 2022 21:07
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Dirk the Average posted:And if it's really bad, just take the battery out of the car, wait a few seconds, put the battery back in, and restart everything! I know this is a joke, but even if you pulled the twelve‐volt battery, the vehicle would maintain power via the DC–DC converter from the traction battery. Gotta pull fuses.
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Jul 5, 2022 21:14
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Mac bitching notes: Safari: when I try to select a pic for say, Facebook, only accesses one album in my photo library Contacts: Editing 'company' in contacts is just hard as can be. Why? Safari: Copy and Paste is unreliable. Copy often doesn't. Mail: End up with the wrong content in a saved email. These bugs have persisted for as long as a decade. Bonus: I can't sign up for AWS in Chrome ...
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Jul 5, 2022 21:15
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withak posted:Can't you just reboot the car if Netflix freezes? Yes, long hold both buttons on the steering wheel will hard reset the entertainment system and get you going again.
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Jul 5, 2022 22:33
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Is it even possible to buy a dumb car these days?
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Jul 5, 2022 22:33
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is it even possible to buy a dumb car these days? Used/vintage is basically the only option at this point.
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Jul 5, 2022 22:35
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