5 ms·

This reminds me of something we had at my office about 15 years ago because people were complaining their workstations were slow. In reality, their workstations

by ben1040 14y ago

This reminds me of something we had at my office about 15 years ago because people were complaining their workstations were slow. In reality, their workstations were just slow machines; standard issue box for most people was a 70MHz Sun SS-5. So we wrote a perl script that printed out a bunch of platitudes like these, while printing out an ASCII "progress bar." It had some randomly determined sleep() calls in there to make it seem like it was doing something. Optimizing priority queues... Recalculating scheduler lookup tables... Terminating unused system processes... Recovering memory leaks... Flushing network buffers... Then it'd randomly pick a number X and report to the user "System reports X% faster." We called it "speed" and deployed it to the app server. Some folks started getting into the habit of running it every morning and swore by it.

nathan_long 14y ago
That is both brilliant and evil.
greenfrog 14y ago
Reticulating splines
- derefr 14y ago
  Other ways to reticulate splines: - Like a documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlWmYe8HM4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlWmYe8HM4 - Extremely dramatically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT2gfHU6yCU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT2gfHU6yCU
hysterix 14y ago
My father was an audio engineer/mixer and worked with some big names. He told me a similar story that happened to him later in life when he finally owned his own studio. There were clients that would always insist on making audio adjustments, for no good reason at all. They were paying to have their music professionally mixed, yet still insisted on making adjustments and changes. Finally my dad and his friend came up with a great solution. Mind you this was prior to everything being digital, so what they did was they had a massive 24 track. (a really big machine where you can individually adjust the sound of each track) Well what they did was installed a knob that looked just like the other ones in the track, but placed it a bit lower and near to where the client would be sitting. The client was then told they can adjust the "openness", or the "richness" by adjusting this rotating knob to a particular setting (remember, the knob does nothing, and isn't connected anywhere). My dad said clients would spend hours adjusting this knob until they got it "just right", and would make sure to let everyone know in the studio that knob was dialed in and to not touch it. It's amazing how many silly things people have to do in all walks of life to placate the ignorant.
- acdha 14y ago
  One of the best designers I've ever worked with had a similar great strategy with clients who considered themselves design experts (usually senior marketing/advertising managers) and who would almost inevitably want to change something in the “final” design. The solution he had was to leave one obvious minor flaw in the final design – a color which doesn't quite match, odd font choice, etc. It was a lighting rod for unnecessary fiddling and was quite successful for keeping the changes quick and low-impact.
  - hoka 14y ago
    There's a (Dilbert?) comic somewhere out there about this. Can't find it at the moment, though :-/ edit found it: http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/2000/400/12448/12448.strip.gif http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...
    - bobbles 14y ago
      The tv show had a part where they say they always give the manager a stupid option and a realistic option to make it feel like he made the decision
      - grakic 14y ago
        What if the manager chooses the wrong one?
        derleth 14y ago
        Apple's maps for iOS.
    - og1 14y ago
      that is a corporate lore story. See item 5 "A duck" http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
  - 14y ago
rohern 14y ago
This is basically Unix shamanism.
dzhiurgis 14y ago
I think I know what I am going to do over the weekend... Every time I meet my colleague in the kitchen what we talk about is how phase shift of 0.5 and has reversed the polarity which serialised the hyperplane clustering by 1.1
dylangs1030 14y ago
That's brilliant. If I had a situation where I had to deal with non-technical people I'd implement this in a heartbeat.

by ben1040 14y ago

nathan_long 14y ago

That is both brilliant and evil.

greenfrog 14y ago

Reticulating splines

derefr 14y ago
Other ways to reticulate splines: - Like a documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlWmYe8HM4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZlWmYe8HM4 - Extremely dramatically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT2gfHU6yCU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT2gfHU6yCU

hysterix 14y ago

My father was an audio engineer/mixer and worked with some big names. He told me a similar story that happened to him later in life when he finally owned his own studio. There were clients that would always insist on making audio adjustments, for no good reason at all. They were paying to have their music professionally mixed, yet still insisted on making adjustments and changes. Finally my dad and his friend came up with a great solution. Mind you this was prior to everything being digital, so what they did was they had a massive 24 track. (a really big machine where you can individually adjust the sound of each track) Well what they did was installed a knob that looked just like the other ones in the track, but placed it a bit lower and near to where the client would be sitting. The client was then told they can adjust the "openness", or the "richness" by adjusting this rotating knob to a particular setting (remember, the knob does nothing, and isn't connected anywhere). My dad said clients would spend hours adjusting this knob until they got it "just right", and would make sure to let everyone know in the studio that knob was dialed in and to not touch it. It's amazing how many silly things people have to do in all walks of life to placate the ignorant.

acdha 14y ago
One of the best designers I've ever worked with had a similar great strategy with clients who considered themselves design experts (usually senior marketing/advertising managers) and who would almost inevitably want to change something in the “final” design. The solution he had was to leave one obvious minor flaw in the final design – a color which doesn't quite match, odd font choice, etc. It was a lighting rod for unnecessary fiddling and was quite successful for keeping the changes quick and low-impact.
- hoka 14y ago
  There's a (Dilbert?) comic somewhere out there about this. Can't find it at the moment, though :-/ edit found it: http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/10000/2000/400/12448/12448.strip.gif http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/...
  - bobbles 14y ago
    The tv show had a part where they say they always give the manager a stupid option and a realistic option to make it feel like he made the decision
    - grakic 14y ago
      What if the manager chooses the wrong one?
      - derleth 14y ago
        Apple's maps for iOS.
  - og1 14y ago
    that is a corporate lore story. See item 5 "A duck" http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
- 14y ago

rohern 14y ago

This is basically Unix shamanism.

dzhiurgis 14y ago

I think I know what I am going to do over the weekend... Every time I meet my colleague in the kitchen what we talk about is how phase shift of 0.5 and has reversed the polarity which serialised the hyperplane clustering by 1.1

dylangs1030 14y ago

That's brilliant. If I had a situation where I had to deal with non-technical people I'd implement this in a heartbeat.