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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, @07:31PM
...you could flick the light on traffic lights by kicking them really hard.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:10PM
Seems like a lot of work to climb up the poles to get to the lights to kick them.
(Score: 4, Funny) by ticho on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:26PM
It's a placebo thing too - all the climbing and kicking is just to help you pass the time until the signal changes anyway.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:48PM
I remember watching that old documentary where some cool guy could get the right song off the jukebox by hitting the side of it.
I guess the other buttons where like placebo, but taking people's money because they didn't wear leather jackets.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:39PM
The progress bar that steady moves till near the end and then it inevitably gets stuck for a long-ass time before final (if you're lucky) completion. Whoever came with that, thou be a jackass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:41PM
That. My fav is a download. Going full blast until about 98% then 0 bytes for 20 mins. Whattttt is it dooooing....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:51PM
Pause and resume. Go back to full speed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:04PM
Yay!
An XKCD [xkcd.com]
(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
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(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!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:31PM
Hey, if you're so smart, you write a better one.
As frustrating as they may be, sometimes it's not *possible* to give an accurate prediction. And are you sure it was time elapsed, not % progress?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:51PM
As frustrating as they may be, sometimes it's not *possible* to give an accurate prediction.
In which case, why bother to have one anyway?
And are you sure it was time elapsed, not % progress?
Regardless, progress bars, IMHO, should be reserved for situations where there's actually some sort of rough correlation between "progress" and "time." By placing a bar that fills up while moving in a particular direction, you are creating a sense of dimensionality that should correlate to SOMETHING. If it doesn't correlate (at least roughly) to time, then what does "progress" even mean?
Now, you might say, "Well, it could be correlated to the number of files copied. You need to copy 100 files, but the last 3 files are a thousand times as big as the rest." Well, then are you really measuring "progress" in a meaningful sense? Most people don't care how many files are copied -- they want to know when something is going to be done.
And if copying the files won't reasonably correlate with time, then maybe you should just get rid of the progress bar completely and just have a file counter displayed. Then you avoid the implicit association of dimensionality of progress (generally expected to correlate with time) that a "progress bar" indicates. If you have a bunch of different tasks, just put a checklist and indicate when each completes. Even better, put a little note on that checklist to steps that could take a lot longer than others, so users are prepared for it.
I personally hate "progress bars." Unless you're doing some sort of linear task where the rate of completion is roughly constant in 99% of scenarios, I'd prefer they not be there at all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:39AM
They correlate to the user's sense of frustration.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Leebert on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:52PM
So... kind of like the "Deactivate your account" button on Facebook?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JNCF on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:12PM
I once had somebody give me the advice that before investing the time to fully implement some features in a web app I should put in buttons that just report back to the server that a user tried to use them... and do nothing else. Then I would know which features people are trying to use, and I could implement those ones without wasting time on the others. Contextually, it sounded like advice that he had been following himself.
He didn't work for facebook, though the story would be better if he had.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by tibman on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:05PM
Woah, hope that spam mod was a mis-click. Because he isn't wrong. Plenty of services "delete" your account and don't actually delete anything. It is known.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:16PM
And even if he was wrong, it wouldn't be spam (unless he was a shill for MySpace, perhaps). Spam has a very specific meaning.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Wednesday August 24 2016, @01:53AM
I reversed the spam moderation. The modder looks like they made a misclick; they don't have a history of downvoting good posts so I didn't modban them temporary.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:58PM
I'm fairly certain the walk buttons around here do nothing to influence the traffic lights, but they universally make the beeping noises when you touch them. While the light is green in the chosen direction there is a "beep boop" for the visually impaired. They also make sure the little walky guy shows up followed by a blinking hand, then steady-on red hand, where normally that light stays on the red hand all the time.
That's something, right?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:08PM
The lights definitely work where I am at most intersections; most simply will never be green for pedestrians unless they press the button.
I did observe the busiest two intersections seem to disregard the buttons, but the newspaper awhile back, a local reporter interviewed the traffic engineer for the city. He said actually the buttons at some intersections just extend the green cross light by 2-3 seconds; the assumption is if you press them, you are more likely to be strolling and need the time, based on their research.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:49PM
It depends on the intersection, sometimes the only effect they have is slightly elongating the walk signal that you're given, in which case you'd never know if it was doing anything at all. Other times it's mandatory to get a walk signal at all. Otherwise it just shows no walk perpetually.
The jackass that decided that second one was a good idea and then that you had to press the button prior to the light changing or get no permission at all deserves to be stuck on the wrong side of the street while bad things happen to his children.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday August 24 2016, @03:38AM
That's only because the USA has dangerous traffic signal sequences. In many other countries, when the pedestrians can walk, no cars are allowed into the junction (from any direction). With this type of setup, you only want to signal for pedestrians to cross if there really are pedestrians waiting to cross.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:33AM
I've never seen that in the US. But that would cut down substantially on fatalities from people crossing in crosswalks being hit by traffic.
Obviously, that wouldn't do anything about people in uncontrolled intersection, but it would be something to fight for.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday August 24 2016, @11:49PM
I'm fairly certain there's a bug in one of the lights close to where I live. It's one of those lights like the second type you mention that won't give the walk signal until the light changes. It's also a light where it's always green along the main road unless something triggers it to change, either because it senses a car waiting on the side street or someone pushes the walk button to cross the main road.
Anyway, if the light is green on the main road, and you are walking along the main road and push the button to cross the side street, it of course will not give the walk signal (though it certainly could). Furthermore, since it will only give the walk signal when the light changes green in the direction you want to go, it won't give the walk signal until the light cycles, but that won't happen until something triggers a cycle. So assuming you don't push the other walk button to get it to cycle, the only other solution is to wait until a car pulls up on the side street.
Like I say, I'm not certain it a bug because I can't observe the light's behavior in a controlled environment. But I've pushed the walk button, watched while it won't give the walk signal along the main road despite being green for over three minutes(!), until a car finally arrives on the side street which then makes the light cycle and finally it will give the walk signal when it turns green again. I don't usually have that kind of patience for lights that force me to wait a full cycle before giving me the walk signal. If it's green in the direction I want to go, I don't think it's about to change, and it's safe to do so I'll just cross against the signal.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:01PM
it's very relaxing and we hold hands.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gravis on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:08PM
I know a nearby crosswalk with a button that only works during low traffic hours because when it's rush hour the crosswalk never gives pedestrians the signal to walk. So basically, you end up with people waiting there a cycle or so and then playing frogger because some assholes don't think pedestrians are important enough. Playing mind games with people is going to get you dead pedestrians.
(Score: 5, Informative) by jasassin on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:05PM
Modded you up and I feel you bro. My whole city is filled with that stupid fucking bullshit. I wont even get into the asshole that times the lights so that as you go down the road at normal accerlation and maintain speed limit you hit EVERY MOTHERFUCKING RED LIGHT ON THE ROAD. Ok. Im done. Thanks.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @03:25AM
Back before they started putting speed cameras everywhere, I found that if you took off from a green light, accelerated smoothly but quickly to 10km/h over the local limit, you would then hit green after green for the next five to ten sets of lights. If you stuck to the speed limit, you might get the next yellow, but the one after that would definitely be red.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday August 24 2016, @11:49AM
I won't even get into the asshole that times the lights so that as you go down the road at normal accerlation and maintain speed limit you hit EVERY MOTHERFUCKING RED LIGHT ON THE ROAD.
That just means you need to either speed up or slow down just a little as you approach the intersection and you'll instead be synchronized with the yellow or green lights instead. (Or speed up a lot; as someone observed on That Other Site long ago, if you're in sync with traffic lights at 30mph, you'll also be in sync at 60 and 120…)
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:12PM
Does anyone remember gwx.exe?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:44AM
No.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:31PM
you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change.
You have to keep pressing it over and over.
(Score: 4, Informative) by krishnoid on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:55PM
There's a pretty choice word [catb.org] for exactly that, especially if it's fun to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:28PM
From the link:
if he is just turning it but looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it
Think of the children (but not while frobbing please)!
(Score: 5, Funny) by fritsd on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:52PM
That's nothing.
(Only) in America, they've got machines, and they've got buttons, and when you press them, you get a small piece of wonky paper out of it, apparently.
And then a group of augurs and haruspices gathers around to determine whether that should be interpreted as a Hanging Chad, a Pregnant Chad, or a Between-Libya-And-Nigèr Chad.
And then five out of nine people decide who becomes President of Florida.
Or something like that, anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:10PM
That's nothing.
(Only) in America, they've got machines, and they've got buttons, and when you press them, you get a small piece of wonky paper out of it, apparently.
And then a group of augurs and haruspices gathers around to determine whether that should be interpreted as a Hanging Chad, a Pregnant Chad, or a Between-Libya-And-Nigèr Chad.
And then five out of nine people decide who becomes President of Florida.
Or something like that, anyway.
1) Have you seen the Butterfly Ballots [wikipedia.org]? True, the situation should never have gotten into that position in the first place, but I guarantee you've made mistakes in your past, too.
2) Okay, so you don't think the United States Supreme Court should decide. Fine. Then what do you propose instead? The sitting president decides between a political rival and his own Vice President? Congress votes, which will coincidentally match their party affiliations? The state Governers hold a caucus? A re-vote for Florida, where they have extra information the rest of the country didn't have? A re-vote across the whole country?
And more to the point, who should decide what happens next? If you don't like "five out of nine people" then please provide a better proposal.
(Score: 4, Funny) by sjames on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:40PM
Florida re-votes. What harm does the extra information do? Voters should have as much information as possible. But, we also forcibly give everyone responsible a legal name change to "Chad" and hold a referendum about hanging Chad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:13PM
Florida re-votes. What harm does the extra information do?
I expect your post was meant as a joke (and to be clear it is funny, albeit morbid, too), but in case you were being serious...
The harm of having extra information is that it biases the vote substantially. For example, consider the 1992 US presidential elections. Millions of people voted for Ross Perot. If they knew with 100% certainty that he would not win, how many do you think would change their vote to Bush or Clinton... and do you think it would affect the result?
Likewise, consider the Brexit vote. In the hours and days after the elections, how many people do you think would change their vote (or who had abstained but would want to vote)?
In terms of the current election cycle, how many people do you think will be writing in "no-one" or casting a protest vote (or for that matter, voting for a third party, or voting a proverbial "lesser of two evils")? Once the outcome is known (e.g. "Trump wins Florida"), how many people would change their vote to either support a third-party candidate, or away from a third-party candidate because "my vote actually does matter."
If the system was set up for everybody to have multiple votings, then it would make sense. If only a selected sub-group got to re-vote, it would bias the system and give them disproportionate amounts of power.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday August 24 2016, @10:11PM
In each of those cases the outcome of the elections (potentially) better reflects the will of the people, so while I see that things change, I disagree that those changes are bad.
In the case of the presidential election, I would prefer approval voting anyway. since it would also better reflect the will of the people.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:22AM
(1) You don't use machines for voting. You just don't. It's too important. The effort needed for fraud should not concentrate in the hands of few programmers like me and Diebold [wikipedia.org], but be spread out over all the vote counters and officials in all the polling stations. Nobody guards voting machines for the three years out of four that they're stored in some padlocked community shed filled with rusting gardening tools.
It's also a very important, but underappreciated, function of the process, that everyone of modest intelligence can understand how it works.
Blind people and people who can't move from their home or hospital should just be inconvenienced to trust someone to delegate doing the physical voting to. Sorry.
(2) You're right; the judicial branch should decide, because they should be the most a-political of the trias politica.
It was just VERY odd for us, 6 billion foreigners, that the richest and most powerful country in the world couldn't even add up the number of popular votes in one of their provinces without a whole floor show and rigmarole. Do you have any idea how famous the USA is for its lawsuits?
(Score: 4, Touché) by Arik on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:00PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:25PM
Black people don't care what the buttons do, because black people live below the law. They cross when they want and where they want. Nobody bothers ticketing a black person for jaywalking, and nobody dares hit a black pedestrian, because nobody wants to deal with the inconvenience of acknowledging a black person exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:29PM
For years we've referred to the office thermostats as "placebostats" because it was clear they didn't do anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:41PM
There was a time when the thermostats did something, but you and your friends couldn't be trusted to keep your mischievous hands off them, so the thermostats were taken out of the loop. Thanks for ruining it for everyone.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:56PM
I thought that was because thermostats are sexist and they got tired of dealing with the patriarchy.
So, now the thermostat is basically just a woman-friendly thermometer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:19PM
We had our thermostat taken away when one of the secretaries thought it would be a good idea to put her scented candles, LIT, under ours. After that everyone hated the office temp, at least with the old system, everyone knew to dress warmly, but now it just seems to do whatever it wants.
In hindsight though, I'm starting to wonder if the smoke alarms are placebos too. I would think that having three candles lit in the office continually for hours at a time should create some sort of warning.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:48AM
No, the fire and smoke alarms were probably working fine; the "future cat lady" alarm may have been malfunctioning, though.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:22PM
Same AC. She was already a cat lady. I say "was" because she is banned from owning any pets. That's right, she had so many that she let wander the neighborhood and mistreated and they had already taken them away on multiple occasions, they actually took her to court and banned her from owning any. I think it was the third time in 6 years or so, until they ultimately did it. The city even went to the trouble of calling the office and having the boss keep her late because she had so many cats the last time they took them, some were literally living in the walls and they had to exhume some that were illegally buried on the property. The only reason I know how bad it was is because they took photo and video evidence the entire time, which she showed everyone to try and get them to sign a petition to let her have the cats back. Suffice to say, many people, especially new ones, were generally sympathetic until they saw the video. It was so bad that if that is what love looks like, I seriously wonder how mentally ill you'd have to be not to see it. It was also a great illustration about how mental illness can affect part of your life, but not others in that it didn't seem to cause a lot of trouble beyond the hoarding of cats and generally obsessive behavior.
(Score: 2) by riT-k0MA on Wednesday August 24 2016, @06:02AM
I must remember this fantastic trick to cooling the office...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:24PM
Cunts.
And you fucks marry them, and hate the idea of man + qt young girl.
>In the United States, as late as the 1880s most States set the minimum age at 10-12, (in Delaware it was 7 in 1895).[8] Inspired by the "Maiden Tribute" female reformers in the US initiated their own campaign[9] which petitioned legislators to raise the legal minimum age to at least 16, with the ultimate goal to raise the age to 18. The campaign was successful, with almost all states raising the minimum age to 16-18 years by 1920.
>Also: see: Deuteronomy chapter 22 verses 28-29, hebrew allows men to rape girl children and keep them: thus man + girl is obviously fine. Feminists are commanded to be killed as anyone enticing others to follow another ruler/judge/god is to be killed as-per Deuteronomy. It is wonderful when this happens from time to time: celebrate)
(Score: 2) by deadstick on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:32PM
...the switch on the butter dish in the fridge that says HARD-MED-SOFT?
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:42PM
They should move them to about knee-height. That way:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:25AM
They're training people to take one of two avenues:
First: hit each button. Repeatedly. Thermostat? Light? Traffic signal? Nuclear launch? Doesn't matter. If it didn't work the first time, maybe it waits for more than one to try to measure more people waiting, or impatience, or something like that. Hit all buttons, a lot.
Second: ignore the damn buttons and do what you want. They don't do anything anyway. Urban/government/corporate planning is full of lies and malice.
Neither one is a good outcome.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @04:38AM
b/c I've known about this placebo thing for years. But the thing that gets me is, on some streets the walk button actually does do something.
So I'll be standing at the light in an unfamiliar town for awhile, then a local will come by and press the button, and the light changes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:00PM
So logically, it would make sense to press the button unless you know it doesn't do anything. As you'll be waiting for the signal anyway it doesn't cost you any time, and it is only a marginal increase in effort.
(Score: 1) by FacialPaper on Wednesday August 24 2016, @08:15AM
The elevator buttons work as advertised where I live, though I don't think I ever saw anyone using them. Unlike in Japan, where they also work and where people are pushing them constantly. You push the button, a light flashes, the door closes immediately. The reason that they don't seem to work that way in the US might be that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the doors to always remain open for a certain amount of time. If you push the button before that, nothing happens until that time is up.
See https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/buildings-and-sites/about-the-ada-standards/guide-to-the-ada-standards/chapter-4-elevators-and-platform-lifts: [access-board.gov]
Must elevator doors remain open for 20 seconds?
LULA swing doors, private residence elevator doors, and platform lift gates and doors must remain open for 20 seconds minimum. This does not apply to the doors of passenger elevators complying with §407 which must remain fully open for at least 3 seconds in response to a call (§407.3.5). The opening time is further determined by the travel distance from hall call buttons and signal timing based on a 1.5 ft/s travel speed beginning from audible and visible signalization of car arrival (§407.3.4). Reopening devices must remain effective for 20 seconds minimum, but in reopening, doors do not have to remain open for this length of time if unobstructed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 24 2016, @09:20AM
sudo mod me up