It was all done by one person, "Chris" - but yeah it evolved and always retained backward compatibility hence the "two ways to do everything". I mean there was very likely patches submitted and stuff, it is open source (massive +1 over AutoIT) - but Chris was the lead and put out the releases.

Most of that can be avoided however. Always use := there's never a situation where a single = is needed. That way, Strings are always quoted and % are not needed.
Also I never use if without the () and full braces, to avoid silliness.

I'm certainly not immune to making retard code errors myself due to these oddities however! starting to think hall of shame candidate...

yes, pretty much all of these. never use non-expression mode

another AHK quirk that i hate is auto-concatenation with a space.

Any of the software that 95% of callcenters use is just awful.

Ex: TELUS - Their software is so bad and slow that if you dont do things EXACTLY in a specific order, you can crash your system and if you've already placed an appointment through their callendar system, you can go back and try to grab the same appointment but its lost.

I've also worked at various other call centers who all have really awful software, sometimes the program takes longer to load than the actual call.

Hah, that reminded me of a good contender - Roger's Cable TV Guide software was ridiculous. Every night the channel guide would be interrupted with a pop-up saying "Changing Date" that would render your TV useless for 1-3 minutes.

The channels weren't in any sort of order. Logically you would probably group channels by some scheme: Network TV, Sports, PPV, 24 Hour news, Knowledge Specialty Channels, HD vs Standard Def, what have you - but nope, not Rogers. They just seemed to dump a bunch of channels into a bag and pick them at random. As an added touch a bunch of channels would be included 3 or 4 times with absolutely no difference.

And the best part was that if you tried to use their OnDemand feature you had about a 1 in 3 chance of having your whole cable box do a hard reset. And you had about a 1 in 3 chance of having the software freeze. And you had about a 1 in 3 chance of a really slow UI (20-30 seconds to chance categories) in which you could eventually get to your program.

I used to have a job at a super market during the graveyard shift, and it was a bad night for anyone who had to stock the soup aisle because it took all night to stock 10 boxes of Campbell's soup. I once asked the manager why they didn't organize the soup in a way that was either alphabetical order at least chicken-with-chicken. He told me that the point was to force customers to browse, so it was best to make shopping for soup as confusing as possible.

Anyways, I'm sure you can think of many examples of where companies attempted to use B&M concepts in the digital world to epic failure. Hell, there's still plenty of examples today.

Huh, I wonder if that's actually a profitable strategy. It feels like you're actually just pissing off customers (not to mention spending extra money on employees).

Edit: And also, great point about the many failures of moving B&M concepts into the electronic world.

It's actually really shocking to hear this tbh...one of the worst things about working in a call center is the obsession with metrics that causes people to intentionally do a ****ty job just to keep their call time at a minimum

I wouldn't know if it is a profitable strategy or not. His point was that if you made it easy to find what you are looking for, then the only thing the store would sell is chicken noodle soup, but the soup companies appreciated it if they sold potato/broccoli/bacon w/ cheese soup as well. This, in theory, made the customers more satisfied in the end because forcing them to browse forced them to try new things and there is no better feeling than trying something new and deciding you like it.

Of course, this endless cycle of frustration and trying something new allowed the soup companies to create more products and add more variety to the soup line, thus causing the soup companies to look inventive and customer-friendly, which made Campbell's the go-to soup company for new items, variety, and of ultimately, chicken soup.

In regards to customers just getting frustrated: the customer is unlikely to give up, so they'll get their soup, and may in fact, buy more due to relief of finding the product.

The manager gave me the impression that Campbell's, et.al. liked it that way. Unfortunately, I don't know if that was the case. I can only dream of creating such subtle marketing [genius or bs?].

At least the manager gave me the logic of the situation. I don't discount the thought that he was making this all up. The real reason may have been that there was once 20 cans of soup, then a new can was introduced, and rather than make space in an appropriate spot, the employees just filled in the blanks, but without evidence either way, I'll never know the answer.

There's probably not much information out there, but here's at least one source:

It's on page 3:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...rl1uhqGxi93Y3Q

It's common practice in supermarkets. It's also very common that the way stuff is displayed is dictated by the producer and not the supermarket. This is a pretty big issue with beer in the US they'll even send out consultants to optimize the ordering and stuff. Kinda depends on how powerfull the supermarket chain is though.

My local supermarkets here keep shuffling around the places where they put stuff to keep people in there longer.

I think it's an idiotic practice and I'm fairly convinced that long term making the shopping experience as pleasant and easy as possible is far superior.

(I'm a marketing genius, too so you can take my word for it)

OMG I hate this steaming pile of crap with such a passion. My company uses this and it's the reason why I can't get any traction with Jira (SP is too entrenched).

Please don't belittle the work they did on the UI. There's a reason why Linux has never managed to gain share on the desktop and it's because of the UI. How many programmers and hours have been spent on Linux window managers? The OS X UI is no small feat.

Very cool and surprising. Of course its still probably not profitable for the store since they only get a portion of that 5% but have to pay the extra wages. But I guess if the choice is display the soup the way the producer wants it or don't display the soup at all - its a no brainer decision.

I don't think this is the reason. The UI is fine (better than Mac's in my opinion, which doesn't count for much.)

Yeah, I think the UI is one factor but its definitely not the major one.

yeah...I think an install process that involves the following steps:

is more of a hurdle than the UI for most people in the widespread adoption of linux.

Yes, the fact that that process is still required in a modern operating system is ridiculous.