I have a dental appointment scheduled for tomorrow morning so today I received a text message from the clinic asking me to complete forms in advance. Not the first time; they’ve been doing this all through the Covid pandemic. Usually the form asks about any symptoms I may have and other health related questions. This time, though, the form started by asking me to upload a “profile photo” with no option to skip that step. I’m unwilling to do that so any questions they really need answered can be asked when I check in tomorrow morning.
I would take a picture of the back of my head and submit that.
I thought about taking a picture of the inside of my mouth. Really that’s the only thing they might need.
Or find a copy of the Rolling Stones big lips logo…
My health care provider’s software just started to do the same thing, also with no option to skip that step. I’m now just ignoring the check-in request.
Your provider and mine may be using the same software. It’s a bullshit requirement.
Totally agree.
I’m not sure if this is stupid or not, but it’s worth mentioning in this thread.
I went on a trip a couple weeks ago. The airline had free wifi on board for passengers with an account in their mileage program. When I tried to log in, it prompted for my account number and password.
I didn’t have those numbers handy, but I did have the airline’s app on my phone. When I installed and set up the app, I had to provide it my login credentials. Ever since then, when I run the app, it scans my fingerprint to allow me access.
“Ah ha,” I thought, “my phone already has the login info for my mileage account. I’ll just start the app, scan my fingerprint, and it’ll have an option somewhere to log in to the in-flight wifi.”
Well, I looked, but I’ll be damned if I could find a way for the app to access the wifi. Not bad design, exactly, but wouldn’t that be a pretty obvious feature for an airline app to have?
i know its an old as-hell game these days but when Blizzard made the first Diablo game they didn’t know how to code h aiming with a mouse without the character moving. i know the whole thing is point and click but even in 1994 there should of been some way of being able to stand there while using a bow without having to run up on top of the monster …
There seems to be a lot of variation between streaming services as to exactly when it will mark an episode of a show as “watched”.
Netflix has probably the best interface of all the streaming services. If I stop watching when the credits start rolling, it cues up the next episode the next time I want to watch that show. Others seem like they won’t consider an episode to be completely watched unless I either let it start playing the next episode, or watch all the way to the end of the credits. If I stop at the beginning of the credits, exit the app, and turn off the TV, when I come back to watch the next episode they want to “resume” the episode I already watched. Max, at least, will start playing at the point where I stopped watching and I can just hit the “next episode” button when it pops up. But lately Hulu has started replaying the last episode I watched from the very beginning, even though I clicked “resume”, and I have to manually skip to the next episode once I realize that’s what’s happening.
Oh yeah, this, such a poor design. I suspect the people designing and coding the interface never use the platform. Or the behavior is some kind of decree from on high, to some misguided end.
One of them will put up a “Next episode?” button after a a few seconds into the credits. Works great if you want to watch the next episode right then. However the appearance of the “Next episode?” button is not the same as the line when an episode is marked complete, so if instead of watching the next episode right away, I stop, then when I return to that show it puts me back to the credits of the episode I just watched.
I nominate software my ex-employer had monitoring our internet usage. If it saw us accessing pornography on company computers, it would shut down our internet access for a day as punishment. Likewise if it saw us accessing something that it thought was pornography.
I was doing a lot of computational fluid dynamics, “CFD” for short. I was using online references which would of course often include “CFD” in their text. And “CFD” also stands for something dirty (I figured out once what exactly it stood for but no longer remember).
The stupid software would announce its punishment, but also allow you to register a protest if you thought you should be able to access the content. So I tried this registration process. It required that you specified the exact type of pornographic content you thought you should be able to access, provided an alphabetized list of the different types of pornography, and would not complete the registration until you had selected two of the types. I picked the first two, “Anal” and “Asian”, and submitted.
Most human beings must feel some kind of objection to “Asian” being a type of pornography, given that over 59% of people live in Asia.
I suggested that the protest form should take into consideration that some of us might not be trying to access pornography, and might merely have been misidentified as doing so. Didn’t get anywhere with that one.
Ooh, yeah, give me that hot Coanada action!
Did you try scrolling down to see if “CFD” was one of the porn categories listed?
Well, if you want to talk about stupid software making inane assumptions, you need go no farther than the SDMB’s own Discourse…
Many times when software is being configured on a server, there will be a text based configuration files. These configuration files are frequently self documenting, with comments and the default value of the option listed, but also often commented out.
So the configuration file might end up looking like this, with some options that should just be the default left commented out, and ones that need to be customized set to the necessary value.
# Set foo to bar, baz, or boz
# foo: bar
#
# Set timezone to system default, or specify an override
# timezone: system
timezone: UTC
The software I am currently setting up provides a documented configuration file. However, the commented out options sometimes are automatically set to the shown value as a default, and sometimes are not set at all unless explicitly uncommented and set.
So something like
# Data directory
# datadir=/data
#
# Output directory
# output=/out
Will cause the software to default to reading from /data, but then crash because the “output” directory is not defined.
Easy solution, just go through the config file and uncomment all of the default values. Except, that doesn’t work because some configuration options change the behavior of the software if they are defined at all. For example if SSLEnable is set to anything (even 0 or false), then the software tries to use SSL.
This is really a documentation bug, because if the documentation said something like “if SSLEnable is defined, then SSL will be used” then it might be a poor design decision, but easy enough to deal with. Instead it is just a guessing game, and configuration by trial and error.
Yep, Prime and Disney+ are both bad offenders here. My kids watch several kid/cartoon shows that are pretty short, 4-7 minutes each or so. However, they don’t get saved as fully watched when the next episode starts. It is really convenient to have the next episode automatically play, but now upon rewatching, the kids are given each as a minute of end credits, skipping to the next minute of end credits, and so on. It means that to watch any episode, I have to be quick on my remote control menu presses to find the ‘restart’ button before the episode “ends” and skips to the next almost ended episode.
Grr. Gnash.
Max does this with “The Sopranos” Through experimentation I have found it will pull up the correct episode if I
- Let the last episode run completely and not skip it.
- Let the intro run completely and not skip it.
I’ve encountered that, too. I might have been watching something someone in the house watched under my profile, or rewatching something. I do remember it often taking several tries to go back far enough in an episode so it didn’t automatically skip to the next episode. Once it was stable, then I could go to the beginning.
Even better:
I’ve got a piece of old photo editing software that I still use from time to time (I probably should replace it but it does one thing that I need, very effectively).
It has a typical multi-window interface where you can have multiple image documents open at a time, and there are floating/dockable toolbars, panels and the like, and it has two weird behaviours:
- Sometimes when I ask it to perform a task that requires a lot of processing, it just disappears - when I go looking, the whole application has hidden itself behind the other applications I have open at the time - the application changed its own Z order index and went and hid away.
- Sometimes the application shows a modal dialog asking a question, reporting an error or whatever; you can’t do anything else in the application until you dismiss the dialog, but if you happen to switch to a different application and back again, that modal dialog is now hidden behind the document windows inside the application; you can’t click on the dialog buttons because the dialog is behind the document; you can’t move the document out of the way because the dialog is modal and it’s the only thing that is accepting input.