3 ms·

It used to be a practice in the 90s that companies would insert Sleep instructions or other means to delay program execution e.g. to make appearance of heavy co

It used to be a practice in the 90s that companies would insert Sleep instructions or other means to delay program execution e.g. to make appearance of heavy computations being done or to make people buy a "pro" version that was without such elements. Given how frankly stupid is the error, could there be some merit to that? For example to give themselves some ammo for the next versions - if they won't find anything to improve they could pull the rabbit out of the hat and said hey we optimised our code and it loads much faster, buy the new version!

lupire 6y ago
They still do that today. It's why TurboTax is so darn slow and hard to use, wasting user's time.
- kylewatson 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they found a faster turbotax made people trust it less. You want to see it chugging away to "find your deductions" and "catch your mistakes". Ironically the hardest thing I needed TT to do this year was handle my wash sales and it didn't even blink as it imported the 1099s. Wait, maybe it didn't handle them correctly... See what I mean? Now I better double check.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
    Yep, that’s exactly what they are saying
viraptor 6y ago
[citation... wanted] I mean I know it happened, but beyond one or two famous examples which get repeated on tdwtf, was it really a practice? (As in something done regularly, and not in shareware which had explicit visible delays)
fao_ 6y ago
Did you actually read the code. I think if they were going to do that it would be a literal sleep instruction rather than a naievely used way of looping over data edit: Akchually, the DRY method of doing this would be to make a function like: /* Remove this when it's time for a performance improvement! */ function Optimize(int N) /* do stuff N times (so you can limit the amount of performance improvement) */ end and then put that in the places you want to be able to optimize in the future
thepasswordis 6y ago
"Please hold while we look up your account..."

lupire 6y ago

They still do that today. It's why TurboTax is so darn slow and hard to use, wasting user's time.

kylewatson 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they found a faster turbotax made people trust it less. You want to see it chugging away to "find your deductions" and "catch your mistakes". Ironically the hardest thing I needed TT to do this year was handle my wash sales and it didn't even blink as it imported the 1099s. Wait, maybe it didn't handle them correctly... See what I mean? Now I better double check.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  Yep, that’s exactly what they are saying

viraptor 6y ago

[citation... wanted] I mean I know it happened, but beyond one or two famous examples which get repeated on tdwtf, was it really a practice? (As in something done regularly, and not in shareware which had explicit visible delays)

fao_ 6y ago

Did you actually read the code. I think if they were going to do that it would be a literal sleep instruction rather than a naievely used way of looping over data edit: Akchually, the DRY method of doing this would be to make a function like: /* Remove this when it's time for a performance improvement! */ function Optimize(int N) /* do stuff N times (so you can limit the amount of performance improvement) */ end and then put that in the places you want to be able to optimize in the future

thepasswordis 6y ago

"Please hold while we look up your account..."