I used to work for a major online tax software provider. I won't name them but I'm sure you can guess. Not sure if it's still there but right after you log in, there are some redirects that take you to the app servers hosting the product and you get the same type of loading image though no secure connections were being established.
I should emphasize that the connection was already secure, but creating a user session on the server side took a long time so this graphic was displayed to users. So don't worry!
A state of the art surely advanced by the USPS. Every time I scribble out an address in my awful handwriting I pause for a second to appreciate the USPS software that reads this and turns it into a barcode. Though to be fair I think all it has to do is decipher the zip code.
It's more complicated than that. The last line has to match two out of three (for example, city and ZIP), and then it can try to do some reverse analysis on what you've written for the address line. (Even that's an oversimplification; it's pretty darn impressive.) The USPS also has the additional challenge of matching what you think is your address with what is actually your address. Very, very few people know their…
The USPS also has the additional challenge of matching what you think is your address with what is actually your address. Very, very few people know their address.
What parts of their addresses do people typically get wrong? Where can one go to find one's actual address?
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…
Did it go up to 11?
Have you ever noticed that the BBC podcast playback controls do go up to 11?
A state of the art surely advanced by the USPS. Every time I scribble out an address in my awful handwriting I pause for a second to appreciate the USPS software that reads this and turns it into a barcode. Though to be fair I think all it has to do is decipher the zip code.
It's more complicated than that. The last line has to match two out of three (for example, city and ZIP), and then it can try to do some reverse analysis on what you've written for the address line. (Even that's an oversimplification; it's pretty darn impressive.) The USPS also has the additional challenge of matching what you think is your address with what is actually your address. Very, very few people know their…
I didn't mean to short shrift them -- hell I brought it up to praise them.
I've been so impressed before by things like wrong addresses -- hell, one time I saw a letter with no address only my name and zip code. And it's not like I lived in a place where my mail carrier knew me. They've built a hell of a technology there.
Nope, a reference to the duck in battle chess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law_of_triviality#Re... and #5 at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
Yup, exact same story. Apparently this happens a lot :)
Nope, a reference to the duck in battle chess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law_of_triviality#Re... and #5 at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
LOL, thank you for broadening my horizons a little.
Nope, a reference to the duck in battle chess. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_law_of_triviality#Re... and #5 at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jar...
LOL, thank you for broadening my horizons a little.
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 t…
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…
although it's one of those things that's hard to pin down as "real", this story is extremely similar to one that's told about murry wilson, patriarch of the beach boys. apparently as he was intent on mucking about during their sessions, brian eventually obtained a dummy console and let his father fiddle with the knobs to his heart's content.