Elevator fail



  • Just came back from a mall. Me and some colleagues were at the topmost floor, and we used the elevators to go to the bottom one. The place had multiple elevator cars that answer to a single button (in other floors there are two buttons, up and down).

    So we got into the first car that came up. But once inside, the sliding doors wouldn't shut. They kept moving as if to close, but then they would open up again. They did so a few times.

    A woman who was with us peeked outside the elevator and said to someone, "hey, if you keep pressing that button, this car won't go down." I heard an "oh, sorry", and then the doors shut and things proceeded as normal.

    I then realized what happened. There was some guy waiting for an elevator car in the last floor with us. He was standing in front of one of the pairs of sliding doors. I figure that as the car we were in started closing its doors, the button's light would turn off. The confused dude must have thought that that meant his car wouldn't be coming, so he pressed the button, which in turn reopened the doors of the car that was present. A couple seconds later the car would start shutting its doors and the cycle would begin again. And again. And again.

    And thenI thought, "wait, he could have just come with us in this very car". And he kept pressing buttons, because when I got to the stree level, I saw another car's display indicating it was jsut arriving at the top floor. Not the one he was standing in front of, though. I wonder if the dude just kept going on like that.



  • @Renan said:

    I then realized what happened. There was some guy waiting for an elevator car in the last floor with us. He was standing in front of one of the pairs of sliding doors. I figure that as the car we were in started closing its doors, the button's light would turn off. The confused dude must have thought that that meant his car wouldn't be coming, so he pressed the button, which in turn reopened the doors of the car that was present. A couple seconds later the car would start shutting its doors and the cycle would begin again. And again. And again.

    Every retard knows you wait for the elevator's light to go out before you hit the call button again, otherwise it'll just re-open the doors of the elevator and annoy everybody in it.

    I had a friend once who didn't know how to use elevators. His strategy:

    1) He is on the 10th floor
    2) He wants to go to the 15th floor
    3) The elevator car is currently on the 20th floor
    4) Since he is below the elevator, he hits the "down" call button
    5) Elevator arrives
    6) Thoroughly confused friend arrives on 1st floor

    He explained this to me on IM and I laughed for approximately 3 weeks. Because seriously, who doesn't know how to use an elevator?



  • The high-rise dormitories at the university I went to had two elevators each. We used to call/ride the elevators down into the basement (where people rarely went) and then place an empty 20-oz pop bottle in the door to trigger the sensors and prevent the doors from closing. The end effect was that no one could use the elevators until someone went to the basement and freed them.



  • Now I know that some buildings have one particular elevator that serves as a service elevator and can make special stops on other floors (like the basement).  Was the elevator the guy standing in front of a special elevator?

    @mott555 said:

    The high-rise dormitories at the university I went to had two elevators each. We used to call/ride the elevators down into the basement (where people rarely went) and then place an empty 20-oz pop bottle in the door to trigger the sensors and prevent the doors from closing. The end effect was that no one could use the elevators until someone went to the basement and freed them.
    Wow, you are so mean.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Every retard knows you wait for the elevator's light to go out before you hit the call button again, otherwise it'll just re-open the doors of the elevator and annoy everybody in it.

    I had a friend once who didn't know how to use elevators. His strategy:

    1) He is on the 10th floor
    2) He wants to go to the 15th floor
    3) The elevator car is currently on the 20th floor
    4) Since he is below the elevator, he hits the "down" call button
    5) Elevator arrives
    6) Thoroughly confused friend arrives on 1st floor

    He explained this to me on IM and I laughed for approximately 3 weeks. Because seriously, who doesn't know how to use an elevator?

    Did your friend never notice the lack of a down arrow button on the first floor of buildings (or the lack of the up arrow on the top floor if he ever was on the top floor)?  Also what did he do in buildings that do not show the current floor of the elevators?


  • @Anketam said:

    Did your friend never notice the lack of a down arrow button on the first floor of buildings (or the lack of the up arrow on the top floor if he ever was on the top floor)? Also what did he do in buildings that do not show the current floor of the elevators?

    Apparently not! I wouldn't have laughed for 3 weeks if it wasn't so fucking goddamned stupid. (BTW, he works at Apple at the moment. In their security department.)

    He also once wrote a huge blog entry on how those text message contests that say like, "text the 4-letter answer to this trivia question to win!" were scams, because since each key on the phone represents 3 letters, a bunch of wrong answers would be counted as correct. He showed this blog entry to me to proofread, and I had to carefully explain to him how his entire premise was wrong and how text messages send the actual letters, not the phone keypad numbers you used to type them.



  • @Renan said:

    I then realized what happened. There was some guy waiting for an elevator car in the last floor with us. He was standing in front of one of the pairs of sliding doors. I figure that as the car we were in started closing its doors, the button's light would turn off. The confused dude must have thought that that meant his car wouldn't be coming, so he pressed the button, which in turn reopened the doors of the car that was present. A couple seconds later the car would start shutting its doors and the cycle would begin again. And again. And again.

    Another WTF is elevators that reopen the doors if someone hits a call button while the doors are closing.  I thought that it was standard that if the doors are closing the only ways to reopen them was to block them or hit the open door button from inside the elevator (or if the emergency system has another mechanism), and that hitting the call button would call the next available elevator. Or if I am completely off my rocker and it is commonplace for the doors to reopen if someone hits a call button while the doors are closing, then TRWTF is the light on the call button turning off before the doors have closed and the elevator starts moving (i.e. if the light turns off that should mean that hitting it again will call the next available elevator).

     



  • @airdrik said:

    Another WTF is elevators that reopen the doors if someone hits a call button while the doors are closing.  I thought that it was standard that if the doors are closing the only ways to reopen them was to block them or hit the open door button from inside the elevator (or if the emergency system has another mechanism), and that hitting the call button would call the next available elevator.

    I'm no elevatorspotter but I think most will open the door if you hit the call button.

    @airdrik said:

    Or if I am completely off my rocker and it is commonplace for the doors to reopen if someone hits a call button while the doors are closing, then TRWTF is the light on the call button turning off before the doors have closed and the elevator starts moving (i.e. if the light turns off that should mean that hitting it again will call the next available elevator).

    Agreed that the UI has some flaws. However, this seems like the kind of thing you should just know if you've used an elevator more than a dozen times.



  • Wait a minute, Morby isn't yelling and calling someone a pendantic dickweed?  Who are you and what have you done to our Morby?



  • @KattMan said:

    yelling

    My throat is sore.

    @KattMan said:

    calling someone a pendantic dickweed

    That's more Blakeyrat's thing.



  • @airdrik said:

    Another WTF is elevators that reopen the doors if someone hits a call button while the doors are closing.

    All elevators do that.

    Which is why the courteous non-asshole person looking to call an elevator will wait until the doors close and the light goes off before pressing the call button.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @airdrik said:
    Another WTF is elevators that reopen the doors if someone hits a call button while the doors are closing.

    All elevators do that.

    Which is why the courteous non-asshole person looking to call an elevator will wait until the doors close and the light goes off before pressing the call button.

    Yeah, duh, ignore my above response to him. I was just trying to be courteous and agreeable but I didn't bother engaging my brain enough to realize the UI is perfectly fine and that all elevators will behave that way. That is what I get for not disagreeing with someone. From now on, I'm disagreeing with everyone, ever.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    From now on, I'm disagreeing with everyone, ever.

    That's the Morby we all know and love



  • @KattMan said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    From now on, I'm disagreeing with everyone, ever.

    That's the Morby we all know and love

    No it's not and no you don't.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    From now on, I'm disagreeing with everyone, ever.

    No you' re not.


  • @morbiuswilters said:

    From now on, I'm disagreeing with everyone, ever.

    Yes.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Anketam said:
    Did your friend never notice the lack of a down arrow button on the first floor of buildings (or the lack of the up arrow on the top floor if he ever was on the top floor)? Also what did he do in buildings that do not show the current floor of the elevators?

    Apparently not! I wouldn't have laughed for 3 weeks if it wasn't so fucking goddamned stupid. (BTW, he works at Apple at the moment. In their security department.)

    He also once wrote a huge blog entry on how those text message contests that say like, "text the 4-letter answer to this trivia question to win!" were scams, because since each key on the phone represents 3 letters, a bunch of wrong answers would be counted as correct. He showed this blog entry to me to proofread, and I had to carefully explain to him how his entire premise was wrong and how text messages send the actual letters, not the phone keypad numbers you used to type them.

    I could believe the elevator one as that's kind of a metaphor user interface issue (he's comparing it to a scissor lift control or something). But the text one is absurd and unbelievable.


    How does he think the text message gets to the other side when you text someone? Does it just choose a permutation of the possible words by the numbers? What about feature phones with full keyboards? Does he think they map to numbers?


    You should show him the leap year mayan calendar troll, that is if he didn't write it himself in seriousness.



  • @dubbreak said:

    You should show him the leap year mayan calendar troll, that is if he didn't write it himself in seriousness.

    Huh?



  • @dubbreak said:

    You should show him the leap year mayan calendar troll, that is if he didn't write it himself in seriousness.

    I have zero idea what you're referring to.

    @dubbreak said:

    How does he think the text message gets to the other side when you text someone? Does it just choose a permutation of the possible words by the numbers? What about feature phones with full keyboards? Does he think they map to numbers?

    He just wasn't thinking. As soon as I pointed out the problem he got it immediately. The funny part is he wrote like a 2,000 word blog entry about it before talking about it with anybody else who would have instantly pointed out the flaw.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @dubbreak said:
    You should show him the leap year mayan calendar troll, that is if he didn't write it himself in seriousness.

    Huh?

    Ok, here's one of the versions I saw:
    @someidiot said:

    There has been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar Created it in 45BC.

    Without the extra day every four years, today would be july 28th, 2013.

    Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap year....so technically the world should have ended 7 months ago!!!!

    Uhhhhh, yeahhhhh.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    He just wasn't thinking. As soon as I pointed out the problem he got it immediately. The funny part is he wrote like a 2,000 word blog entry about it before talking about it with anybody else who would have instantly pointed out the flaw.

    Noooooo. How can you not think of something yet write a 2,000 word diatribe on it?


    He should have just posted it with: "IF texting worked this way, then..."



  •  It depends on the company and how old the elevator is. I've seen both.  Usually if there is only one elelvator, pressing the button will cancel the elevator on that floor, so you can get on.  So most elevators in any highrise don't do that, since how would you know which elevator to cancel?



  • @dubbreak said:

    Ok, here's one of the versions I saw:
    @someidiot said:
    There has been about 514 Leap Years since Caesar Created it in 45BC.

    Without the extra day every four years, today would be july 28th, 2013.

    Also, the Mayan calendar did not account for leap year....so technically the world should have ended 7 months ago!!!!

    Uhhhhh, yeahhhhh.

    Oh. Yeah I saw that going around. As a person who's literally written a Gregorian-to-Mayan calendar conversion library, I found it particularly galling.

    Since I have some free time while this query runs, here's the deal:
    1) There is no "the" Mayan calendar; Mayans had three calendars used for three different purposes
    2) It is true that none of the Mayan calendars had leap years
    3) The Long Count calendar is nothing but a count of days from a particular epoch-- it doesn't have leap years because it has no concept of "year". None of the Long Count cycles are intended to represent a year.
    4) The Tzolk'in was a religious/ceremonial calendar, and dates in it didn't necessarily correspond to anything at all in the non-spiritual world. (Many meso-American leaders we know about were named after their birth-date in the Tzolk'in.) It loops every 260 days, obviously it's not meant to represent a "year".
    5) The Ha'ab was the closest equivalent the Mayans had to our yearly calendar. It had exactly 365 days which means that, over time, it "slips". But here's the thing: the Ha'ab can be cross-checked with the Long Count, and the amount of drift was compensated in that way. Which means, maybe one year you plant the crops in the month of Sip, and maybe 50 years later, due to calendar slip, you'd plant your crops in the month of Sotz'.
    6) So while "the" Mayan calendar didn't have leap years, the Mayans knew that it didn't match the Earth's rotation exactly (and there is evidence they calculated the length of the Earth's rotation far more accurately than European calendars used at the time), and the Mayans corrected to compensate. As far as we can tell, their time-keeping as at least as sophisticated as any other civilization's at the time.
    7) That said, all of this is moot, since the calendar that "predicts the end of the world" is the Long Count, and it doesn't even have a concept of "years". So of course it doesn't have a concept of "leap years".

    @dubbreak said:

    Noooooo. How can you not think of something yet write a 2,000 word diatribe on it?


    He should have just posted it with: "IF texting worked this way, then..."

    I don't know honestly. I think he was just so excited by the idea, he started writing... I could totally see doing that, although writing that much about it before realizing the flaw is a bit much.

    Then again, this is the guy who didn't know how to use elevator call buttons. So.



  • @TomTom said:

    So most elevators in any highrise don't do that, since how would you know which elevator to cancel?

    The one that's on the floor. Or, if there are more than one on the floor, there are these wonderful things called "computers" which would allow it to just pick one. I'm sure I've seen this work in highrises before.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    7) That said, all of this is moot, since the calendar that "predicts the end of the world" is the Long Count, and it doesn't even have a concept of "years".

    Wait, so the whole Mayan thing is really just a Year 2038 problem? What's amazing is that they could create a system that lasted hundreds of years whereas ours can't last 68 years.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    7) That said, all of this is moot, since the calendar that "predicts the end of the world" is the Long Count, and it doesn't even have a concept of "years".

    Wait, so the whole Mayan thing is really just a Year 2038 problem? What's amazing is that they could create a system that lasted hundreds of years whereas ours can't last 68 years.

    No, it's a "you go one digit to the left and increment it" problem. Meaning, it's like when the Gregorian calendar went from 999 to 1000, you just have to add a digit... no difference between that and the Long Count. The reason that that digit wasn't written before is that it never came up before. If you lived in the year 800, you don't write 0800 because you don't need the zero.

    Not only that but there's some (admittedly weak) evidence that the Mayans had already defined 5 higher digits to the Long Count. There are some Mayan inscriptions that hold dates (Gregorian-equivalent) like "00000800" for A.D. 800. The question is whether those zeros were actually considered valid Long Count digits, or whether they were on the inscription for some other reason.

    For what it's worth the Long Count digits we have now are sufficient for an approximately 5126-year cycle. You can't accuse the Meso-Americans of being short-term thinkers.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Oh. Yeah I saw that going around. As a person who's literally written a Gregorian-to-Mayan calendar conversion library, I found it particularly galling.
    OK, just out of curiosity I went and looked at your code, and I think I found something that belongs on this site:

                    private void RefreshLongCountFields()
                    {
                            _baktun = 0;
                            _katun = 0;
                            _tun = 0;
                            _winal = 0;
                            _kin = 0;
    
                        for (int dayCount = 0; dayCount < _longCountDays; dayCount++)
                        {
                                _kin++;
    
                                if (_kin > 19)
                                {
                                        _kin = 0;
                                        _winal++;
    
                                        if (_winal > 17)
                                        {
                                                _winal = 0;
                                                _tun++;
    
                                                if (_tun > 19)
                                                {
                                                        _tun = 0;
                                                        _katun++;
    
                                                        if (_katun > 19)
                                                        {
                                                                _katun = 0;
                                                                _baktun++;
                                                        }
                                                }
                                        }
                                }
                        }
                }
    

    OK, never mind the great pyramid of code — if I'm reading this correctly, every time one of these objects is instantiated, you're counting up days from 11 August, 3114 B.C.E. to the given date.  Day.  By.  Day.  That's a pretty long count indeed.

    Admittedly, I'm not a C# expert, but I would've thought it had a modulus operator...



  • Yeah, pretty badass huh?

    I wrote that in like an hour so I could figure out what my meso-American name was.

    Rule of optimization: don't. Experts only: don't yet.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I wrote that in like an hour so I could figure out what my meso-American name was.

    What do dates have to do with your meso-American name?



  • @mott555 said:

    We used to call/ride the elevators down into the basement (where people rarely went) and then place an empty 20-oz pop bottle in the door to trigger the sensors and prevent the doors from closing.
     

    Wha'dya use to put it in the path of the sensors, duct tape?

    Every elevator I've looked at long enough to become familiar with such things, the "door blocked" sensor is at about crotch height.  (More iconcially, it's at essentially the same height as the "close door" button inside the car.)



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    I wrote that in like an hour so I could figure out what my meso-American name was.

    What do dates have to do with your meso-American name?

    @blakeyrat said:

    (Many meso-American leaders we know about were named after their birth-date in the Tzolk'in.)

    Of course we don't know if all meso-Americans were named after their birthdates, or even if those who were had alternate/popular names. But that's what I was looking to find. It's hard to "sync-up" the Tzolk'in without having a Long Count date handy, and it's hard to find a Long Count date without a Julian Day Number. So there you go.

    I came across a Mayan leader named "18 Rabbit", and my curiosity "what the hell kind of weird-ass name is 18 Rabbit?" led to my researching all this. Then I was going to write an alternate history novel, but it's pretty much stalled like 2 chapters in, so.



  • @da Doctah said:

    Every elevator I've looked at long enough to become familiar with such things, the "door blocked" sensor is at about crotch height.

    The ones I've seen usually have pressure sensors on the doors themselves so if something blocks it the door opens. Otherwise you'd have pets, toddlers and people's arms getting chopped off.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    I wrote that in like an hour so I could figure out what my meso-American name was.

    What do dates have to do with your meso-American name?

    @blakeyrat said:

    (Many meso-American leaders we know about were named after their birth-date in the Tzolk'in.)

    Of course we don't know if all meso-Americans were named after their birthdates, or even if those who were had alternate/popular names. But that's what I was looking to find. It's hard to "sync-up" the Tzolk'in without having a Long Count date handy, and it's hard to find a Long Count date without a Julian Day Number. So there you go.

    I came across a Mayan leader named "18 Rabbit", and my curiosity "what the hell kind of weird-ass name is 18 Rabbit?" led to my researching all this. Then I was going to write an alternate history novel, but it's pretty much stalled like 2 chapters in, so.

    Ah, I missed where you said that originally. Very neat, thanks for the info!



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    I wrote that in like an hour so I could figure out what my meso-American name was.

    What do dates have to do with your meso-American name?

     

    Well, the dates my father had with my mother have a lot to do with my name. Especially the long dates.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:
    Every elevator I've looked at long enough to become familiar with such things, the "door blocked" sensor is at about crotch height.

    The ones I've seen usually have pressure sensors on the doors themselves so if something blocks it the door opens. Otherwise you'd have pets, toddlers and people's arms getting chopped off.

     

    That too, but you have to stop them emphatically enough to push the rubber bumpers back to trigger the sensors.  I remember sticking my arm into the door of one such elevator and they closed neatly around my wrist; I had to pivot my arm sideways for it to become a big enough obstacle to actually force the doors open.

    (Cheat-sheet because someone's bound to conjure up the wrong picture:  extend arm forward through door with palm to side and thumb upward -> door closes; extend arm with palm down and thumb to the side -> door opens.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Of course we don't know if all meso-Americans were named after their birthdates, or even if those who were had alternate/popular names.
    I went to high school with a guy whose name was August March (his alternate/popular name was "Sandy").  I think he was from Chicago, which is meso-American in a sense.



  • @dubbreak said:

    How does he think the text message gets to the other side when you text someone? Does it just choose a permutation of the possible words by the numbers? What about feature phones with full keyboards? Does he think they map to numbers?
     

    He works with Apple.

     



  •  The last place I worked at had some serious elevator fails.

    When I started work there the building was old but well cared for,  its seventies décor looked a little dated and various internal systems, plumbing, electrical, security all needed updating to bring them up to modern standards. It was decided we needed a refurb.

    The elevators where ancient and analogue but worked, most of the time. When they didn't they were pretty easy to fix, if something tripped we just had to cycle the power, if a button stopped working we could just fix it ourselves (the place was predominantly electrical engineers). Obviously by modern safety standards this is a WTF and they shouldn't have been breaking down in the first place, they needing replacing as part of the refurb. Point is that at least they were broken in an easy to keep going kind of way.

    So the refurb comes, the building is stripped appart with us still inside it, they couldn't afford to relocate us so the plan was to shift people from floor to floor and do the building one floor at a time. It was terrible trying to work with the noise, building work, rubble etc but it was soon over.

    The new elevators came! They were even less reliable than the old ones, never mind though, just teething troubles we thought.

    We had three elevators, one of them had a habit of loosing power somewhere between the first and second floors at which point it would just coast to a halt, I tried to avoid using that one unless I was feeling lucky. Its twin was for the most part more reliable although it did tend to loose track of where the floors where every now and again.

    The third was on a separate system and was intended to be a goods/service elevator, this one played a subtle game of earning our trust before failing.

    The all new fancy digital systems couldn't just be reset without the attention of the appropriate service personnel so when they broke, they stayed broken until someone came out to fix it. This became a weekly thing with the repair guy telling us "I dunno, there is nothing in the error log." The only elevator which seemed reliable was the goods lift, so we took to using that.

    That was until one morning an unsuspecting victim got in at the basement and pressed for the top floor, the elevator rose, and rose, lost track of the floors, kept on rising and didn't stop until it slammed into the buffers at the top of the shaft triggering an emergency shut off that powered down the whole system.

    At least this time the repair guy did manage to track down the fault, whereas our old elevators had a very simple system to find the floors (a steel belt with holes punched in it at the appropriate points) the new ones used a contact less system. Sounds good, less moving parts and switches, less to go wrong. Thing is, the old ones had worked for the last thirty years without loosing the floors, sure on hot days the belt would stretch slightly and you might be presented with a little step but they got there.

    The new ones used relative positioning, there was a magnet and a hall effect sensor, every time the car passed by this point the floor level calibration would be reset and from then until the next pass (there was only one of these points in the whole shaft) it would simply guestimate where the floors were based on knowing how many times it had turned the motor and thus how much cable it had moved between car and counterweight.

    Apparently the bolt securing the magnet had been overtightened when the system was installed and the magnet had cracked, it was only a matter of time until it fell apart and once that had happened the elevator drifted evermore out of sync with the floors until its fateful meeting with the roof.

     



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    I wrote that in like an hour so I could figure out what my meso-American name was.

    What do dates have to do with your meso-American name?

    Why do you ask, Two Dogs Fucking?



  • @Anketam said:

    Now I know that some buildings have one particular elevator that serves as a service elevator and can make special stops on other floors (like the basement).  Was the elevator the guy standing in front of a special elevator?

    That particular mall has no special elevators. I've worked there, I'd know if there was one. They do have some architectural WTF's, though. For example, the mall is L shaped; on the west side of the mall, there are escalators that only go up. On the north side, the scalators come in pairs, each upwards scalator right next to its downwards counterpart. So if you're in the north side and you want to walk down a level quickly, it's pretty trivial, but if you're on the est side and want to do the same thing, you have to walk to the north side first.



  • @Renan said:

    For example, the mall is L shaped; on the west side of the mall, there are escalators that only go up. On the north side, the scalators come in pairs, each upwards scalator right next to its downwards counterpart. So if you're in the north side and you want to walk down a level quickly, it's pretty trivial, but if you're on the est side and want to do the same thing, you have to walk to the north side first.

    Not as bad as the Woolworths in the city here. It's over two floors. If you want to get a trolley, you have to get it before you get in and get everything you need in the basement before you go up to the ground floor: there are only two travelators in the store, and the down one is at the entrance. There are two escalators as well, but trolleys are verboten on them. And they only did it up about 12 months ago: prior to that the two travelators were next to each other smack bang in the middle of the store so you could go up and down as you pleased with your items.

    What is more annoying is that if you're like me and you don't shop with a list, and are just there to pick up a few random things as you remember them, you will probably find yourself switching floors to find every other item.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Rule of optimization: don't. Experts only: don't yet.

    If you're going to say " I wrote it crappy because I wanted something quick, "  that' s fine,  but don' t pretend that using modulus over counting an entire loop would be premature optimization.


  • @Sutherlands said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Rule of optimization: don't. Experts only: don't yet.

    If you're going to say " I wrote it crappy because I wanted something quick, " that' s fine, but don' t pretend that using modulus over counting an entire loop would be premature optimization.

    OH NOES BLAKEYRAT WROTE WTF CODE AND PUT IT ON A PUBLIC SITE quick burn an effigy!

    Seriously, what the fuck is your beef? You've now spent more time bitching about the code than I did writing it.

    Hey guess what? It fucking works. For the program I wrote to fucking run ONCE EVER to find a fucking value I NO LONGER EVEN REMEMBER get over it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Sutherlands said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Rule of optimization: don't. Experts only: don't yet.

    If you're going to say " I wrote it crappy because I wanted something quick, " that' s fine, but don' t pretend that using modulus over counting an entire loop would be premature optimization.
    OH NOES BLAKEYRAT WROTE WTF CODE AND PUT IT ON A PUBLIC SITE quick burn an effigy!

    Seriously, what the fuck is your beef? You've now spent more time bitching about the code than I did writing it.

    Hey guess what? It fucking works. For the program I wrote to fucking run ONCE EVER to find a fucking value I NO LONGER EVEN REMEMBER get over it.

    Really?   How long do you think it took me to write those 2 sentences?   Do people magically slow down their typing when they' re on the internet vs when they're writing code?   The only beef I have is you defending your bad code.   You said " I wrote it crappy because I wanted something quick. "   That' s fine,  I don' t care,  it' s bad code.   Just don't try to defend it.


  • @Sutherlands said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Sutherlands said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Rule of optimization: don't. Experts only: don't yet.

    If you're going to say " I wrote it crappy because I wanted something quick, " that' s fine, but don' t pretend that using modulus over counting an entire loop would be premature optimization.
    OH NOES BLAKEYRAT WROTE WTF CODE AND PUT IT ON A PUBLIC SITE quick burn an effigy!

    Seriously, what the fuck is your beef? You've now spent more time bitching about the code than I did writing it.

    Hey guess what? It fucking works. For the program I wrote to fucking run ONCE EVER to find a fucking value I NO LONGER EVEN REMEMBER get over it.

    Really?   How long do you think it took me to write those 2 sentences?   Do people magically slow down their typing when they' re on the internet vs when they're writing code?   The only beef I have is you defending your bad code.   You said " I wrote it crappy because I wanted something quick. "   That' s fine,  I don' t care,  it' s bad code.   Just don't try to defend it.

    Can we stop all this fighting and get back to discussing the exciting world of elevator etiquette?



  •  I'm so happy! :D



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Can we stop all this fighting and get back to discussing the exciting world of elevator etiquette?
     

    So, which wall are you supposed to face in an elevator?  And does this remain constant or is it dependent on situation?  For instance, what if the elevator has doors on two ends of the car instead of just one?



  • @too_many_usernames said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Can we stop all this fighting and get back to discussing the exciting world of elevator etiquette?
     

    So, which wall are you supposed to face in an elevator?  And does this remain constant or is it dependent on situation?  For instance, what if the elevator has doors on two ends of the car instead of just one?

    This is a complex and nuanced subject with ten of thousands of man-hours of research invested.

    The proper orientation of passengers in an elevator is highly sensitive to the surrounding environs and the kind of building it is in. For example, a lift in an expensive office tower demands a more tightly packed and forward facing orientation, while a residential high rise suggests a looser packing, especially given that many passengers might be carrying large parcels, carts, strollers, desks or elephants up to their apartments.

    In addition, the set of passengers has an effect. If you are riding in the elevator with your boss, you will likely be angled towards him slightly. If you're travelling with passengers that you don't know, you will more likely face forward and avoid eye contact. A notable exception is if the other passengers are a boss and his employee, in which case you should position yourself between them.

    And of course, the layout of the car is not without consideration. If the elevator has two doors, then some external knowledge is required. If the rear door of the elevator exists because it is used by staff or while moving large equipment, you can normally place yourself in front of the door without fear of it opening up unexpectedly. Conversely, if the door exists because the ground level exits on the other side, then you should still place yourself in front of it, and forget that it opens that way so people get annoyed.

    Finally, it is worth bearing in mind the people not inside the cab, but waiting in the lobby. Their normal position should be in an amorphous crowd around the one elevator of 6 that appears to be moving. A curious pattern has been observed: The more frequently the elevator stops as it moves down the tower, the closer packed the crowd becomes, and the less consideration to the people inside the elevator is given.

    I am of course summarizing years of work into a single forum post, but I think I have given a decent example of the potential complexity born of this seemingly simple social interaction.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @KattMan said:
    yelling

    My throat is sore.

    @KattMan said:

    calling someone a pendantic dickweed

    That's more Blakeyrat's thing.

     

    Your throat is sore because of Blakerat's thing?



  • @havokk said:

    Your throat is sore because of Blakerat's thing?

    Pfft.. he wishes. It's merely a little scratchy.


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