- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
I thought charging them $5,000 was more ridiculous than the customer thinking it was broken (although that was really bad). I would have charged them extra to go back and put in the delay, but I when they asked for a speedup I would just give them the regular version for free again. but seriously, charging them and lying about what they were chargins them for is wrong.
Admin
Could work, as long as the original doc was created in Office 2000 or later.
Admin
I recall reading of one phone hacker registering his victim's phone number as that for a coin phone. When the victim picked up the phone, he was prompted to insert 25 cents.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Admin
I don't think sharing "tails" is very sanitary...
Admin
Won't work. The customer wanted the delay put back in because they though the new, super quick version was broken. You can't say to the customer, "It's not broken, but if you want us to 'fix' it, we'll charge you." The customer will balk at paying money to fix what they perceive as a bug.
But it *does* work the other way -- the customer will pay money for what they perceive as an improvement. It might be ethically wrong (though funny) to charge them $5,000 for it, but there you go.
Admin
Sorry, meant to quote the following
Admin
I have one of those phones!.
i pulled out the unconnected antenna and said wtf! :)
Admin
About 4 years ago, I had an internship at a cell-phone company, and they were trying to strike a deal with Verizon to support their phones. These phones had an internal antenna, but Verizon made us put an antenna on there because "people feel like they are getting a better signal if they raise an antenna." The antenna was not connected to any internal electronics--just a placebo!
i pulled out the unconnected antenna and said wtf! :)
Admin
Ah, never mind, I'm just dumb. Perhaps you should've just explained why it ran faster, reversed the changes to the blocking settings and showed them that now it ran properly slowly (though they still probably wouldn't have believed you) - or better still, done them seperately in the first place (or not at all).
Admin
No, the real WTF (aside from this being a dupe) is that when Jeremy made his 'fix', he left the "Analysis working" dialog in place and made it disappear almost instantly, making it appear that something was going wrong.
The proper way to fix it would've been to change the "Scanning..." window (if it existed; if it didn't, it should have) to say "Scanning and analyzing..." so that the customers (including the picky one) could see that the analysis was still being done.
Admin
If I understand you correctly, in the early days of VoIP you could pick up your handset and hear the same thing that you would hear whether or not your computer was plugged in?
A dial tone isn't "necessary." A dial tone doesn't make your phone work. It lets you, the consumer, know it is working. Sounds to me like this was a design flaw that the testers got fixed.
Admin
Then there was the Brady Bunch episode where Mr. Brady had a pay phone installed in his living room. Then he had to call a client from home...
Admin
You charged us $5,000 for this so-called work??!!! Well, we'll be taking care of these through the proper channels.
Admin
Not you. We do not charge clueful clients this. It is only if a client is clueless and insists that something which works does not that we charge for the aggravation.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Admin
Nope. A dial tone is a vital part of a "modern" analog phone system. Just like the operator with her board of plugs and wires was vital before the days of automated switching. We've had automated, analog systems for so long, that people have gotten used to the dial tone, even though they don't necessarily know what the dial tone does. In a most digital systems, and definitely in a voice-over-IP system, the dial tone is not needed. (Neither is a computer. A VoIP phone is a standalone computer).
To answer your first question, essentially, yes. Although, if the phone was not plugged in, there would be warning messages/blinking lights/etc on the phone to let the user know that it was disconnected. (Keep in mind that we're talking about dedicated, business-style desk sets here, not your typical $10 home phone). What you would hear, in either case, was nothing. The phone's display would show that it was ready for you to dial, and since you had the handset off-hook, you (as a user) would presumably know that it was time to dial, so the original design saw no need for extra hardware and/or software to duplicate something that was as necessary as an appendix, or an external antenna.Admin
An audio cue is far more appropriate than a visual cue. What if the user is blind?
(What if the user is deaf, you retort? Think about that one for a minute...)
Admin
Actually, I wouldn't give that retort ...
However, if a user was blind, odds are good that the standard desk set wouldn't work for them anyway, and something different and specialized would have to be used anyway.
We're not talking about special phones for special users here; we're talking about the phone that the vast majority of users would have on their desks. The original designers (not me, as a side note) underestimated how dependent people had grown on the dial tone.
Now, let me ask a question: does your cellular phone give you a dial tone? Mine doesn't, and I'd bet that neither does yours.
Admin
Perhaps an adjustment to the user interface could have helped?
[image]Admin
Beautiful.
Admin
That reminds me of something someone (I can't remember who) said/wrote about product placement in TV shows. It went something like (and I'm paraphrasing this poorly from memory, so it's probably totally wrong):
"Say you want to have a bottle of Coca-Cola in one of your scenes. Now, nowadays you need permission from the Coca-Cola Corporation for this, so you ring up their legal department, ask for permission, and they come back to you and say, 'Sure, that'll be $500'. Alternatively, you can call them up and say, 'we're filming such-and-suck and we'd be happy to place a bottle of Coca-Cola in one of our scenes - for the small fee of $500', and they come back to you and say, 'sure, OK'."
Admin
I don't have one, but I believe you. Still, maybe it should... not necessarily a dial tone per se, but some kind of audio cue that the phone is alive.
Visual cues are also apropos, of course. Some users might want to look at something else while they dial the number... some might want to look for the cue before bothering to look up the number.
Admin
The real WTF is that the programmer didn't change the progress-bar caption from 'Analysis working' to 'Reading analyzed data', as that is what the bar really was showing progress for.
Admin
My home phone provides several tones to indicate status. If there is no tone, the phone is likely not plugged in. If there is sidetone but no dialtone, then my phone is connected (and off-hook) but not ready for dialling. If I have dialtone, my central office is ready to accept dialled digits. If dialling does not "break" dialtone (i.e. remove dialtone and supply sidetone), my phone might be broken or the CO might be experiencing problems. For example, in an "overload" condition, the CO will deny dialtone to shed excess load.
Dialtone does not meet any needs of the CO: the switch already knows that I've gone off-hook, and knows if I've started dialling. Dialtone is an indicator to the user that the CO is ready to perform digit collection.
Admin
Well, there are actually people reading TheDailyWTF and SlashDot... Count me on on both sites!
Christ
Admin
Typically the customer consists of a number of people who disagree with one another. One of them is right - the supplier gets to guess which one. (Just been bitten by one of those).
To be fair, most of my customers have been good ones.
But there was the customer who, 2 months into a 10-month contract, suddenly came up with a new non-disclosure agreement. It was so restrictive that it effectively said that no-one on the team would be able to work in IT again. After a rather tense couple of months the customer backed down.
Admin
Generally speaking, the customer is almost never right, and as dazed says, they are frequently wrong inconsistently. However, the customer pays for the right to believe that they are right. Part of dealing with customers is finding a way to let them believe they are right, whilst subtly guiding them towards the right path. All without screaming "you are a clueless fuckwit" down the phone.
This is difficult to do.
Simon
Admin
Pfff... It used to be until pretty recently (and in some cases still is) common practice to include delays in software here in Greece (Alex, being Greek, might have seen/heard of this).
The thought process behind it goes like this: Your app only has to be as fast as necessary to be competitive (besides actual features), so those things that work faster than necessary (i.e. much faster than the competition) have to be slowed-down artificially (i.e. to just visibly faster than the competition). When there is sufficient demand for a speed improvement (resulting either by losing in the competition arena, or by the demands of a very g$$d client) you can deliver fast results by reducing (or eliminating) said delays.
Of course, this "optimization" can only happen so many times before all delays are striped from the code (and developers need to really start optimizing stuff), so nowadays this practice persists only on very expensive, custom/vertical-market products (e.g. medical software), where there are monopolies or oligopolies, so that the clients can be regularly milked.
Admin
Reminds me a little of a customer I dealt with in a past job... we wrote a piece of code to do some early morning processing for them that ran for maybe 30 minutes. Whilst running it displayed a snail running backwards and forwards. Finally, the offer that required the code ended and the program was duly removed from the system. The users missed the snail though and so, for a price, we coded up a big loop that ran through in approximately 30 minutes so the snail could live again :)
Admin
I would have put a key for Unnecessary Delay in the registry and have an associated Tools=>Options parameter to set it. Default to 10,000 for that client, 0 for others. Also I would have put a 'Hurry Up' button on the progress bar that immediately finishes.
Admin
My first WTF involving a Yank-customer!!
Like a milestone.
I remember having to put a sleep command in a vb6 documentation app. Why? So that the printer had time to switch to duplex for printing double sided pages.
Is that a hardware WTF? Like the printer needed breathing time? Did the printer say - 'well you're not giving me a break so I'm doing everything single sided'. I walked past the HP printer and whispered 'You're being outpaced by a vb6 application running on windows 2000!'. The printer said nothing back.
Admin
I sure hope the programmer got a nice bonus out of this one.
Admin
Ha! I claim to be the only person in the world who has accidentally written a snail crawling over the screen.
It was an early micro with a memory-mapped screen. A slip-up in a piece of copying code caused a loop which wrote through memory, including the screen-mapped area. It just so happened that the characters being repeatedly written looked just like a little snail (with spaces at the back) which crawled over the screen and gobbled up all the characters there. By far the best bug I have ever seen.
Admin
It was also running on an IBM made server!!!
Admin
But there is no way you could charge $5,000 for such a minor interface adjustment. ;o)
Admin
And what makes me laugh is that these days people won't buy phones with antennae (and I don't remember anyone doing so here (Ireland) 4 years ago, either).
They are thought to be outdated and behind the curve.
Darjien
Admin
My mobile (cellphone, state-side) doesn't provide a dial tone but after dialling and pressing send it does play a tone on loop to let me know that the connection has not fallen over while I'm standing there with it pressed to my ear.
Admin
Suuure. For me, charging 5000$ for setting delay := 5000 is scam. Fraud. Cheat.
Admin
Why am I not at all suprised about this? Even when dealing with customers that are technology companies themselves, they inevitably don't really understand what your technology is doing. Usually it involves always sticking to preformed assumptions about how they think it works inside. Even if you explain it a million times, and give specific advice on how to make it do what they want, or fix some problem, they so often end up forgetting all your expert advice and falling back on their strange and clearly erroneous assumptions. Why??
Admin
Furthermore, (as another who formerly worked in the 'booming' Telecommunications business) in the early days of VoIP because the signal was digital there was SILENCE when no words were being spoken. From an engineering piont of view this makes sense; no data being transmitted, no sound.
Users were, however, found it unsettling to hear 'dead air' between sentences; often believing the call had been dropped. So there was "comfort noise" injected (generated locally; not transmitted needlessly across the network) when no audio signal was being processed.
All those years the Telecommunications technology had matured to such a point that we could hear a pin drop and the silence was deafening to the user!
Admin
This reminds me of fun I had making a N64 emulator ten years ago. It just popped a window checking your system and drawing pretty checkmarks next to several things, until it failed on CPU, as there was nothing that could even come close to emulating an N64 back then.
The thing is, I received hundreds of emails begging for whatever it took to be able to play their N64 games. Ah, good times.
Admin
Yeah, right.
You work for free? You work for free on stuff that is totally unnecessary?
If a customer insists, despite all your explanations, that you do some unnecessary work, then quoting them a ridiculous sum to try to persuade them to go away is not a scam. And if they do accept that quote, then you are honour bound to do the work.
Contrariwise, there are plenty of times when you end up doing a large amount of work, and the customer doesn't even realise it. Value is in the eye of the beholder. If you're lucky, it evens out in the long run.
Admin
I know I haven't seen this (same exact) WTF before. ;) "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead."
Admin
Hey, charging $5,000 for a software delay is no scam! Alternatively, you could easily drop that kind of cash for some very "valuable" information. Think, "Real Estate Wealth Expo". Think, "Robert Kiyosaki". Think "Donald Chump". Think, "Brillant!" <FONT size=2>*digression ~ drops into a veryNull state of consciousness*</FONT>
Admin
<FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ff0000" face=Tahoma color=#7fffd4 size=5>But it works now, right? I really wanna play my "Paper Mario". Can you help?</FONT> <FONT size=2>(enough posting for the day).</FONT>
Admin
I worked for a compay serveral years ago who did charge £5,000 (or something like that) for an "Upgrade" from the Win16 to Win32 version of the program. The thing is the program was identical as it was wrote as a Win32 app designed to work against the Win32s (or whatever the comp. layer was called). Talk about a rip off. :O
Admin
In the case of a cell phone, I connect after I've dialed. If my phone isn't on, I get a black screen instead of a white one.
When it comes to a phone, I'm looking at a black LED display on a bright background and often it'll be reflecting light right back at me. Are there ways of verifying? Yes. But simply listening for the dial tone is the most effective way to know I've got a connection.
There's all sorts of other reasons to have a dial-tone. Just two weeks ago, we had a good example right in this office. The power was fine, the connections were fine but there was a small outage for some reason. The only reason we found out (and, truly, the only indicator) was the lack of dial tone. Let's say your router is connected to your phone but the connection from your router to the ISP is down, or further down the line there's a problem. A lack of dial tone would tell you "a problem exists that would prevent me from making this call".
And actually, I do dislike the lack of dialtone on cell phones. Half the time, when I make a call, it takes a few seconds for it to connect, and I'm always annoyed by the perpetual silence before I start hearing the clicks of it being connected.
Admin
In the case of a cell phone, I connect after I've dialed. If my phone isn't on, I get a black screen instead of a white one.
When it comes to a phone, I'm looking at a black LED display on a bright background and often it'll be reflecting light right back at me. Are there ways of verifying? Yes. But simply listening for the dial tone is the most effective way to know I've got a connection.
There's all sorts of other reasons to have a dial-tone. Just two weeks ago, we had a good example right in this office. The power was fine, the connections were fine but there was a small outage for some reason. The only reason we found out (and, truly, the only indicator) was the lack of dial tone. Let's say your router is connected to your phone but the connection from your router to the ISP is down, or further down the line there's a problem. A lack of dial tone would tell you "a problem exists that would prevent me from making this call".
And actually, I do dislike the lack of dialtone on cell phones. Half the time, when I make a call, it takes a few seconds for it to connect, and I'm always annoyed by the perpetual silence before I start hearing the clicks of it being connected.
Admin
Jeez chaos_engineer, you are a doos.
1) None cares on a more elegant solution.
2) How would the "configuration parameter" be set if the hardware is upgraded ? Magic I suppose ?
Admin
The bar was still appropriate... the window popped up, it analyzed the last row of data, and then did the flaw detection determiniation, which took about 1 second (on the 750MHz processor we were using at the time)...
I could have had the bar pop up during the scan, saying "Scanning and Analyzing", or whatever, but my goal was to get the improvement added quickly. Eventually, I did remove the status bar altogether and just had the scan results window pop up.
Don't forget, all of our other clients understood and accepted what was going on.
For those of you thinking malfeasance, the $5,000 also covered some real work, but it's funnier the way I told it. And, that customer was by far the most annoying and demanding, making us fly to their (very) remote site once a month to add features that they then didn't really want to pay for, holding over our heads the promise that they were going to buy a bunch more systems if we could get it working right. Unfortunately, "right" was a moving target that we never could achieve and we eventually told them to go pound sand... but it took a long time. In the meantime, I think our company Pres. was just tryinog to recoup some of our losses.
Admin
The customer is usually WRONG and an /\SSHOLE.