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from the push,-pull,-swipe,-turn-and-Pong dept.
Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change. You finally get a green light, cross the street, arrive at the office, get in the elevator and hit the close door (>|<) button to speed things along. Getting out on your target floor, you find that hurrying has you a bit hot under the collar, so you reach for the thermostat to turn up the air conditioning.
Each of these seemingly disconnected everyday buttons you pressed may have something in common: it is quite possible that none of them did a thing to influence the world around you. Any perceived impact may simply have been imaginary, a placebo effect giving you the illusion of control.
In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise.
[...] Today, a combination of carefully orchestrated automation and higher traffic has made most of these buttons obsolete. Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all. So why not take them down? Removing the remaining nonfunctional buttons would cost the city millions, a potential waste of already limited funds for civic infrastructure.
More examples are quoted in linked article, and some suggestions how tech can make our lives more pleasant while waiting - Pong anyone?.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:47PM
I remember in the old days, seeing a few that were poorly coded enough that they clipped through the other edge of the box containing them and kept going.
I think it had something to do with making the progress bar a function of time elapsed, but not actually remembering to stop it at any point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:35PM
I wrote one of those once with two different methods that allowed overflowing progress bars. It also calculated the amount of progress as a function of a stored benchmark of how long a certain process took and did the math for a rough guess on time, which meant progress equaled elapsed time divided by the quantity of fudge factor multiplied by estimated time. Also, to keep people from thinking it stopped, I had an override to add one pixel after a huge amount of time (5 minutes, I think, and this was back when 1 pixel was considered huge). Both of those together could make the progress bar go way over in the wrong conditions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:07PM
In my day we called it "programming" and not "coding" because coding was something you did when you were encoding data into a coded representation, and programming was something you did when you were writing programming instructions. Get off my lawn, dumb kid coder.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:01PM
software developer
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:03PM
Programming results in computer code. Not that big a deal to say something was poorly coded instead of poorly programmed. In ten years the gripe will probably be "In my day we called it 'engineering' and not 'programming' because programming was something you did when you were writing something without any architecture or standards." Something like that anyways : P
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:17PM
No you have history backwards. First it was applied mathematics, then it was computer engineering, then it was programming, then it was software development, then it was coding, and soon it will be brown-people-squeezing-out-a-shit. Actually I think we might already be at the shit stage.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday August 23 2016, @11:23PM
Guy who wrote the crappy progress bars, is that you?
:D
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!