I’m reasonably certain that Texas Instruments owes its near-monopoly in the calculator business exclusively to under-the-table deals with school districts and other educational entities. As of a few years ago, for the mandated state tests in Ohio, students were permitted to use any approved calculator for the math portion, and the approved calculator was the TI-suchandsuch. There were hundreds of calculators on the market with the same capabilities, but the TI and only the TI was approved, so every school district in the state bought those so they could teach their students to use them.
(thankfully, they’ve since moved away from that. Now, students can use almost any calculator, so long as it lacks certain features like wireless communications, and the computerized tests come bundled with Desmos, which has the benefit of being an actual high-quality piece of software)
The CBS system worked fine and was chosen by the FCC as the standard. It got supplanted because it didn’t work with b&w, requiring everyone to get a new TV. Thus NTSC (or, as it was known in the trade “never the same color”) became the new standard.
I want to indict the entire world of car-phone connectivity and utility, at least in my limited experience.
I think it is FANTASTIC that my phone and car have the ability to communicate. I wish my phone always knew how full my gas tank is, even when I’m nowhere near the car. It’d be great if my phone came to associate calendar events like “Dentist” with a location, and knew to put driving time buffers around them based on the phone’s experience. My phone could grow to know not only where I am right now, but where I will probably be at arbitrary points in the future based on my calendar. And if I was almost out of gas, the next drive time buffer would grow by however long my phone learns it takes me to buy gas. And of course every time I use my car, its drifting dashboard clock would be put right again, including DST changes. Why don’t we have my phone GPS abled to be displayed on the much bigger screen at the bottom of my dashboard, which normally just displays the words “Audio off”.
But no. All I have found that phones and cars can do together is provide entertainment. Which is worse than worthless, because driving and not killing anybody is all the entertainment anybody should need. I find oncoming traffic, and bends in the road, utterly fascinating.
You should look into Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Much of the stuff you describe is available in my 2017 Chevrolet Volt, actually supplied by the phone and Google’s intimate knowledge of my every move. I get in the car and it knows I’m going to the dentist, and shows me at what time I’ll be there given current traffic.
And OnStar connectivity allows me to see the charge level, fuel level and some other details on my phone, from far away.
My Android phone LOVES to automatically download system updates at midnight when I’m asleep and have my alarm set, and then when the update installs it will auto restart my phone so it gets stuck in the UNLOCK TO ACCESS FEATURES lock screen with the alarm turned off. I’ve been late to things so many times because of this.
I’ve just remembered a time I had to book an online exam. To do so, I had to fill in my home address, which included picking my “city” from a drop-down list populated with every city in the world not in alphabetical order.
Oh, I just remembered another one while catching up on this thread: endless scrolling on websites and limited ability to use the browser’s built-in search because not all of the content is loaded. Sigh, but we’ve already discussed this ad nauseam elsewhere on the forum.
I have never had this happen, because while my phone automatically downloads updates, it never applies them until I give it the go-ahead. If there is some setting to let updates apply automatically, the default must be “off,” at least for me.
Under ‘Settings’ there is a ‘Software Update’. Opening that reveals something called ‘Smart updates’. That’s ‘on’ for me, but it only installs security updates automatically. For me, it’s between 2 and 4 in the morning. Perhaps that’s what @Asuka is referring to, and it can definitely be turned off.
One of the tax programs (Turbo?) did this to my wife. No warning, no “Do you want to save?” She closed her laptop and opened it up to finish our taxes the next morning. Annnnd, she had to start over. I checked, and the app had no SAVE button, not even in a menu. And no mention of how to save in the ‘manual’.
But you could hit Control/Command-S and save a current version. [shrug emoji]
Perhaps this is the online version of which you speak, but I’ve been using the desktop (paid-for) software for almost 20 years, and it’s always had a Save button. In fact, it always asks if I want to Save when exiting the program.
There is apparently a memory leak in Google Maps. I am making a map of Europe for a wargame I play, and have been noticing that when both the map editor and GM are running at the same time that my system starts chugging (this is a new system note, 8 gigs RAM), and GM would periodically lock up. An hour ago it finally crashed my system. I just used System Manager to keep track of the memory usage, and it steadily increased from 1 gig to close to 4 gigs in 10 minutes before I closed it. Apparently nobody at Google expected anybody to keep their map window open for many minutes on end while they gather data off the thing, instead assuming people would quickly check a route or a landmark or something, then close it.
Going to DL Google Earth and hope I don’t have any more issues.
Huh, my phone has been doing that for years, based on my biking time. And it did it without ever needing to communicate with my vehicle.
And my phone installs updates on its own, fairly frequently, but usually the only indicator I have is that it tells me I need to re-enter my unlock code after fingerprinting it. It’s never failed to set off my 6:30 alarm.
The Bank of America iPhone app is pretty good, but they have a UI issue that gets me every time.
When you use the app to deposit a check, it asks you to type in the amount of the check. As soon as you start typing, the huge NEXT button changes from grey to blue, so naturally, I hit it every time I’m done typing in the value.
But, that doesn’t work - you have to hit the tiny “Done” button first…
The screenshot in @beowulff’s post reminded me of one of my pet peeves – I hate, hate, hate, when phone apps make you enter a numerical value using the full on screen keyboard rather than the numeric keypad like in that screenshot.
Case in point: I ordered a pizza in Round Table Pizza’s app last week. When I tried to enter my credit card number it brought up the full keyboard, so I had to tap the key to switch from letters to numbers and symbols, and then enter it using the little number keys along the top. And the same for the CVC code, zip code, and tip amount. They know all those fields are going to be numbers. With just a little more code they could have let users enter them using the much bigger and easier to use numeric keypad.
Round Table’s app also loses points for making you enter the tip as a number, and not giving you the 15%, 18%, 20%, etc options like every other food ordering app.
As an ex-CS prof I’ve run into too many software stupidities to try and uncover the worst from the depths of the old cranium.
So I’ll go with the latest WTH. Doing my taxes, I ran into an unbelievable number of “What were these idiots thinking?” in the tax software. E.g., on one page I had to copy some numbers from the forms to the software. I had forms. Plural. The setup only allowed one such form. The text said to add the numbers up and copy them into the blanks.
Um, this is a computer program. Computers can, you know, compute. That’s the thing they are best at. Why can’t I just put in the numbers from each form and have the program do the math???
I had to repeatedly walk away from the program to unwind after running into this sort of nonsense.
As a volunteer tax preparer, I have to ask: what software were you using? I’ve used both Turbo Tax and Tax Slayer, and I don’t believe I’ve run into this particular issue.
However, I did encounter something similar when using my state’s free tax filing software. Instead of entering the interest amount from each financial institution, I had to add all the amounts and enter the total. Is this what you encountered?
When a website wants me to have a password that’s 12 digits, needs uppercase lowercase numerals and symbols, can’t be similar to previous passwords etc.
All for some fast food website that I rarely use and if my account is stolen it’s going to be a minor inconvenience and it’s far more likely the hackers will take it from their end, not mine.
