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Admin
While I agree that button is a horrible way to silence users, and invoking gc() may do nothing, the only other possibility is benign. I've seen many other buttons that actually had a harmful effect --- corrupting data, for instance --- so I fail to see how this is "worse than useless".
Admin
These days I'd find it difficult to restrain a simple, but probably difficult to answer and equally-probably job-shortening, question:
Admin
I remember a story from a long ago job where people complained about how slow the application was, so they implemented a hurry up button. It made people feel more in control. It did nothing.
Admin
Ah yes, the mirrors-make-lifts-go-faster thing.
If you put mirrors by your lifts, so that someone waiting for the lift can use the mirror to adjust their makeup, or their tie, or their hair, or take a selfie, you find that you get fewer complaints about how slow the lifts are.
Admin
The "hurry up" button gives an illusion(1) of control, whereas the mirror in the lift gives me something to do with my time so I don't notice how slow the lift is.
(1) It's an illusion rather than real control because the button doesn't, in fact, do anything at all.
Admin
I always thought they had mirrors to make them appear bigger. For some people, the realisation you're in a 6-foot square box tends to mess with their psychological wellbeing, so the mirrors trick them into thinking it's a bigger space.
Admin
Maybe even Lars subconsciously realized that their codebase was garbage, and that the manglement was garbage.
Admin
Not in the lifts, but by them so it gives people something to do while they're waiting for them to arrive. Distraction.
Admin
Wasn't there an airport where people complained that the bags took too long to get to baggage claim so they just made the hallway wind longer through the building so that people had to walk a longer distance so they weren't standing around waiting?
Admin
So basically they fired medior and senior developers and were now replacing them with cheaper as-junior-as-they-come developers. What could possibly go wrong?
Although, seeing the horrible mess of code they had, perhaps that was a good thing...
Admin
If you want to 'speed up' a progress bar split it into three sections. The first should take nearly half the time, the second just over a quarter and the third the remaining time.
Change the background color as you go through the sections (red, amber, green?). If you can, name them as something you might plausibly be doing.
Does nothing to speed things up, but gives the user a sense of progress - progress that is speeding up. The user will remember how quick the final section is and be happier with the time waited.
Admin
"It did nothing."
I would have at least had it change the spinny gif to a faster one to complete the illusion.
Admin
Be careful what you wish for… Last year I was in hotel whose lift computer went haywire. Like say, it told you it was going down, but when doors opened you were two floors up. (Like out of American-Japanese horror movie)
Admin
During my "career" in data recovery, lots of work came in from people who faithfully clicked on a "Repair files" button that essentially damaged the remains of usable file data as well as filesystem metadata, making recovery needlessly complicated (and sometimes even impossible). That button should have been named "WRECK MY IMPORTANT BUSINESS DATA NOW!"...
Admin
Placebo buttons are a proud tradition. There's the "Close Door" button in elevators, and the button that's supposed to get you a walk signal at a traffic light.
Admin
medior? ouch
Admin
Apparently ATMs could be completely silent, but they play a noise of gears whirring so you don't think the period of inactivity whilst it figures out if it can give you money means it's broken.
Admin
Close door buttons on elevators aren't placebo. At least not on all of them.
Admin
The "walk" button is perfectly functional outside of a city center; where I live, the pedestrian light never turns to Walk unless you push the button. But in the city center, every intersection has Walk all the time on every green, because they assume there's almost always enough pedestrian traffic to justify it.
Admin
"Apparently ATMs could be completely silent, but they play a noise of gears whirring"
Urban legend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI8u6BPGuIE
Admin
As for calling garbage collection being a null: I've never done Java but I can very well see a case where it isn't a null. Specifically, if something used a resource that should have been promptly cleaned up but they didn't do so. Run the garbage collector and those finalizers get called, the offending resources get freed.
Second, once again I've never done Java, but I have seen problems with the runtime not running the collector properly in C# programs. It's looking at total memory in deciding whether to collect and can end up not playing nice with other programs when faced with repeated allocations/deallocations of objects of variable size. I've seen the system crawl from thrashing because there was 20gb of already-freed junk using up the memory.
Walk buttons have two purposes:
On sensor controlled lights it's not going to know there's a pedestrian there unless someone pushes the button.
Walking takes more time than driving, there is a standard pace a pedestrian is assumed to move and the light time must be long enough for them to get across. With a small street/large street situation it's very unlikely that the standard cycle is long enough for pedestrians to cross the large street. Hence the button to lengthen the cycle.
If neither of these situations applies (and they likely don't in city centers) the walk button has no effect and unless it has some assistance features there isn't a reason to even run the wires. (Around here we have some buttons that if you push them make a noise and then make a different noise when it's green. We also have some that will say "wait", then "walk sign is on across <street name>". Both of those have value even if they have no control over the light.)
Admin
They're used by FIRE RESCUE. The button only functions when the Fire Key switch is turned. This "manual control" is typically also used during construction, where walkie-talkies among floors coordiante where the elevator goes.
Admin
That certainly also helps. But now imagine doing double mirrors, slightly angled, so you see infinite repetitions of yourself softly circling away upwards, as they slowly fade in the distance or the not-quite-100% reflection’s exponential intensity drop-off.
It wasn't an elevator though, but a toilet.