Blaring P.O.L.A. violations!!!

dalecosp

Anyone got any good stories?

I just received a computer on the bench ... ticket says, amongst other things:

And another fault I found is the following --- In a text where a lower case letter is needed, this happens, a lower case letter is actually typed but the computers By itself turns it into an upper case one.

/i (yah, sic sic indeed!)

I think this (l)user is suffering from a case of Microsoft Word... :p

I'm sure that as a POLA violation this one's probably well-annotated, but wondered if anyone else had some good stories, observations, or rants? 😃

LordShryku

Speaking of good MS stuff, here's some email I got this morning....

Do you know about the bloodhound virus? Do you know how to get rid of it?

At work this morning a friend told me she was doing her taxes over the weekend and got hit with the virus. Needless to say, she can't access her programs now. Her ISP is msn. When Norton told her it found the virus, she tried several ways to get rid of it, but none worked. I told her that you'd probably know how to fix it.

After a few seconds with Google, I answered back that it was usually through an email attachment or file sharing program, unplug from the internet, use the cleaner program, etc.

And the reply...

She'll try it tonight. (PS - she said her daughter just
installed a file share program...)

sighs

I know, nothing unusual about that, I just found it funny for a Monday. But I haven't actually woken up yet, so anything's bound to be funny to me right now.

Elizabeth

Ok, I give up - I'm blonde and don't mind looking stupid (but of course I'm not anything like those lusers I was ranting about in the other thread, heh).

What's a POLA?

I know it's not makeup or a movie star, or a supplier of crab and scallop shells or an artist from New Mexico. So the question lingers.

dalecosp

Originally posted by Elizabeth
Ok, I give up - I'm blonde and don't mind looking stupid (but of course I'm not anything like those lusers I was ranting about in the other thread, heh).

What's a POLA?

I know it's not makeup or a movie star, or a supplier of crab and scallop shells or an artist from New Mexico. So the question lingers.

"Principle Of Least Astonishment".

And, %@#@#&*! Google can't even define it. 🙁

Furthermore, ESR doesn't have it in the Jargon file...Time to write a web page, I guess. Or else, delete the thread entirely.

Ahh, here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

And it looks as if ESR calls it the "Rule Of Least Surprise".

POLA is strongly related to DTRT. IOW, you click on the "X", the window closes. Expected. If, however, you click on the "X" and your system reboots itself, that might well be classed as a POLA violation. Your firewall rsules say "pass such and so a packet", but your program logged that it's blocking packets based on the pass rule. WindowsXP reboots when a "BSOD" error errors. It not supposed to happen or not expected to happen, at least that what the average Joe with some concept of DTRT (do the right thing) would think....

The specific variant "POLA" may very well be a Unixism, and a BSD-specific one at that. Googling for P.O.L.A. site:freebsd.org produces 534 hits; at netbsd.org, about 55. Only one return from openbsd.org, and it's unrelated. In the Linux world, not much either. At kernel.org, 2 hits, both of which are quoting material from FreeBSD documentation. At linux.org, 2 hits, one is relevant. Of course, if the Penguin dudes call it "ROLS", that would explain those results.

So, no, you're definitely not stupid; blonde is often considered a good quality, and we like you around here, of course.

Apparently I was being just a little too, hmm, esoteric? 😉

dalecosp

While we're at it, the same client reports

"COM 1 returned not found code 1010"
"COM 2 returned not found code 1010"

So, in my invoice, I'm explaining that when you have an internal software modem and nothing plugged into the system's COM ports, you kinda expect that behavior when running a "modem diagnostic".... :rolleyes:

Elizabeth

Originally posted by dalecosp
"Principle Of Least Astonishment"

Ahh yes, now I can effectively vote for the last applicant on the list.. I like to keep my clients on their toes. 😃

Weedpacket

Ah, not "Principle of Least Authority", then. Had me worried there, for a bit.

davidjam

for instance, a thread by dalecosp that was easy to understand would be a kind of POLA violation... 🙂

dalecosp

Originally posted by davidjam
for instance, a thread by dalecosp that was easy to understand would be a kind of POLA violation... 🙂

Absolutely! I'm a firm believer in "DTRT"! 😃

Weedpacket

So today I was using a financial application. Discovered that using the backspace key in a text field doesn't backspace through the already-entered text, but truncates it instead. Brilliant.

davidjam

Originally posted by dalecosp
...IOW, you click on the "X", the window closes. Expected. If, however, you click on the "X" and your system reboots itself, that might well be classed as a POLA violation....

Firefox's download window (on the mac version) has an "X" which deletes the downloads instead of closing the window... which I found out the hard way. :rolleyes: (ok, I woudn't call this a "blaring" violation, but still...)

dalecosp

Originally posted by davidjam
Firefox's download window (on the mac version) has an "X" which deletes the downloads instead of closing the window... which I found out the hard way. :rolleyes: (ok, I woudn't call this a "blaring" violation, but still...)

Hmm, it might depend. It delete the record of the download ... or it deletes the downloaded file and makes you d/l it again?

That second one I'd definitely complain about.....

dalecosp

So, I do some work for an outfit that has a web-app in coldfusion.

You search for intellectual property creators, synopses of their creations, search for text strings, etc.

I search for the name "Jones". There are 17 "Joneses" in this database. I click "next" to see numbers 11-17.

I find the "Jones" I'm looking for, and they've got 5 pieces of IP that we have a synopsis of. I click the link on their name, and am shown .... nothing at all.

The software, for which they pay $$$/annually (to the premier firm in this particular industry), is passing the value "11-17" to the database query for the IP units ... so only those authors with more than 10 creations are gonna shown up when you do things this way ... and this app has been online for thousands (maybe a hundred thousand?) customers since 2003! :rolleyes:

To top it off, when you enter a message in their online message form, they give you no confirmation whatsoever that your message has been received/recorded.

You can teach MONKEYS to fly better than that!